All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism

by James E. Dolezal

God does not derive any aspect of His being from outside Himself and is not in any way caused to be.

In contrast to this older view of a radically independent, simple, and purely actual God stands the newer approach of theistic mutualism,1 called by some “theistic personalism.”2 In an effort to portray God as more relatable, theistic mutualists insist that God is involved in a genuine give-and-take relationship with His creatures. Theistic mutualists may disagree among themselves on precisely how much control God has over the give-and-take process, but all agree that God is somehow involved in such an exchange.

This ontological openness to being changed by creatures, whether initiated by God or by creatures themselves, is the common denominator in all forms of theistic mutualism. Theistic mutualists may disagree among themselves on precisely how much process and development to allow in God or even over what the ultimate source or cause of such development might be. But all hold to a divine ontology that allows for God to acquire and shed actuality of being.

At first glance, the moniker “theistic mutualism” (or “theistic personalism”) seems harmless enough. Perhaps it is even attractive insofar as orthodox Christians believe in a God who subsists as three persons in relation and who lovingly calls us into the joy of personal fellowship with Him.7 No doubt patristic, medieval, Reformation, and Puritan theologians held forth the glorious prospect of the sinner’s reconciliation to God and the benediction of unbroken fellowship with Him in glory. Theistic mutualists recognize that classical Christian theists believe such things. They are not convinced, however, that the traditional emphasis upon a wholly unchanging, simple, and purely actual God is sufficient to deliver such blessings to us. They think that if God cannot change or be affected by the world in any way, then our relationship to Him seems overly one-sided and thus rather impersonal and nondynamic.

the Bible depicts God as ensconced within our history as one whose relationship with humans plays out along the same temporal lines as relationships between human persons—loving and merciful at one moment (Ex. 3:7–9), grieved and angry at another (Ex. 32:9–10; Ezek. 16:42–43), turning away from man and returning to man in mercy and reconciliation (Ex. 32:14; Ps. 80:19; Mal. 3:7). These are the components that make personal relationships truly personal, are they not? From the viewpoint of theistic mutualism, such dynamic reciprocity and mutuality seem to call for an overhaul of the well-intentioned, if misguided, classical emphasis upon a God who cannot change in any way whatsoever.

This is the argument of the one who promotes mutual theistic God...

Intended to replace the older strong account of an absolutely unchangeable God, the newer doctrine makes space for mutual give-and-take with God in an interpersonal way.

We will have to teach the following: that not only does humanity change in its relation to God, but the living relations of God to humanity…also undergo changes, as both are manifest in the world. And if we establish this point, then the concept of God is not merely the wooden concept of the highest being, but the vital absolute personality that stands in a living relation of mercy and love to the life of the worlds and its changing needs and conditions. Without reciprocity between God and world such vital relations would have no authentic reality.

The actual argument for mutual theism in church history, a 19th century German Lutheran by the name of August Dorner.

The concern from the classical perspective is that theistic mutualists have made human personal relations, which are irreducibly correlative, the paradigm for understanding all meaningful relations. To the extent that theistic mutualists believe God to exist in such a relationship with the world, they appear to undermine His perfection and fullness of being. In short, God has been reconceived as deriving some aspects of His being in correlation with the world, and this can be nothing less than a depredation of His fullness of life and existential absoluteness.

If God should not be all that He is in and of Himself infinitely and eternally, then He would no longer be pure and simple being but rather becoming, and thus dependent on that which supplies new actuality to Him.

“Mutualism,” as I am using the term, denotes a symbiotic relationship in which both parties derive something from each other. In such a relation, it is requisite that each party be capable of being ontologically moved or acted upon and thus determined by the other. This does not necessarily require parity between the parties involved. Accordingly, a mutualistic relation could obtain even if only one of the parties involved were the architect and ultimate regulator of the relation.

The label “theistic personalism” appears to be the coinage of Brian Davies. See An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 2–16. I have chosen to use the term “mutualism” instead of “personalism” simply for the sake of clarity. Davies’s objection to theistic personalism is at its heart an objection to the mutualism that seems to be entailed in all univocist understandings of the term “person.” David Bentley Hart calls the mutualist conception of God “monopolytheism” since, as he explains, it seems to involve a view of God not conspicuously different from the polytheistic picture of the gods as merely very powerful discrete entities who possess a variety of distinct attributes that lesser entities also possess, if in smaller measure; it differs from polytheism…solely in that it posits the existence of only one such being. It is a way of thinking that suggests that God, since he is only a particular instantiation of various concepts and properties, is logically dependent on some more comprehensive reality embracing both him and other beings.

Very insightful!

4. Univocist approaches to thinking and speaking about God necessarily conceive of God’s being as existing (in some respect) within the same order of being as that of creatures and thus as existentially correlative to them. A God who can be moved or affected by His creatures, even if only in accord with His choice to be so moved or affected, is such a God.

One reason that change in God, no matter how small, is theologically devastating is that it would signify some alteration in His being or life and thus, to the extent that

such change occur, destabilize human confidence in His covenant promises.

God alters the revelation of Himself without altering Himself ontologically. He unchangingly wills changes in His ad extra dealings with creatures without willing or experiencing a corresponding change of agency in His own intrinsic actuality.

Psalm 115:3 emphasizes the independence of divine power by affirming that God “does whatever He pleases.”

His love also is independent of the creature. He says of unlovely and wicked Israel, “I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely” (Hos. 14:4).

The point is th...

not moved to love sinners by any loveliness t...

Scripture teaches divine infinity when it speaks of God’s greatness as exalted above all creation. God’s glory is above the heavens (Ps. 8:1; 148:13), and even the heaven of heavens cannot contain Him (1 Kings 8:27; 2 Chron. 2:6; 6:18).

He does not advance toward an end of being with which He is not eternally identical. He is the fullness of being or, as Herman Bavinck so beautifully puts it, “an immeasurable and unbounded ocean of being.”21

While the doctrine of divine eternity is commonly confessed, it is undoubtedly among the most difficult theological claims to understand. God is the King eternal (1 Tim. 1:17), the Alpha and the Omega (Rev. 1:8), the One whose years have no end (Ps. 102:27),

Without divine simplicity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit potentially could be understood either as three parts of God—in which case each person would ontologically precede the being of God and each would lack something of the fullness of divinity—or as three discrete beings or gods who collectively make up a social unit we call God.

The question facing Christians is not merely whether or not we believe that God is one or if the three persons are a divine unity. Rather, the question is at an even deeper level: What sort of oneness and unity should we ascribe to God?

A simple being is one and undivided because it lacks parts and so could not possibly fail to be a unity. A compound being is one and undivided as a result of the composition of all its parts or constituents.3

Every compound being possesses features that are really distinct from its essence and which combine with the essence to give it particularity.

It is this capability of the essence’s composition with some additional particularizing features that allows an essence to be instantiated in a series of multiple beings of the same kind. But for a simple being, multiplication in a series is impossible since it is not composed of essence plus some particularizing feature. Rather, everything in the being just is identical to the essence.

Without a sufficiently strong doctrine of simplicity, it becomes unclear why the three persons are not three gods (or three parts of the essence that are themselves less than wholly divine) and why the divine unity is not merely a moral and communal unity.

The doctrine rests on three basic biblical affirmations: (1) there is only one true God; (2) Scripture identifies three who are distinct as God; and (3) these three are coequal and coeternal in their divinity.

The temptation is to soften some aspect of the mystery in order to make it more comprehensible. Historically this has led to any number of heretical outcomes. For instance, if one denies the real distinctions among the three persons, Sabellianism (modalism) results. If one denies that each and every person possesses the fullness of divinity, subordinationism results. And if one divides the substance so as to conceive of divinity as a generic essence with three particular instantiations, tritheism (polytheism) results.

The Sabellians feared that saying there are three distinct persons who are God would undermine the monarchy of the Godhead, transforming it into an oligarchy and thus implying more than one principle of being back of creation.

The Arians also were concerned to safeguard the singularity of God’s being or substance. They reasoned that as the begottenness of the Son seems to indicate some beginning of the Son, and since it belongs to the divine substance not to begin to exist, it must be that the Son is of a different and inferior substance to the Father. Indeed, the Son must be the highest creature who began to exist at some point.8

with modalism and Arianism in their respective failures to acknowledge real distinctions among the divine persons or the full divinity of each of the three.

The Second London Confession of Faith’s article on the Trinity (2.3), for instance, sits squarely with the pro-Nicene fathers and medieval schoolmen: In this divine and infinite Being there are three subsistences, the Father, the Word or Son, and Holy Spirit, of one substance, power, and eternity, each having the whole divine essence, yet the essence undivided: the Father is of none, neither begotten nor proceeding; the Son is eternally begotten of the Father; the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son; all infinite, without beginning, therefore but one God, who is not to be divided in nature and being, but distinguished by several peculiar relative properties and personal relations; which doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of all our communion with God, and comfortable dependence on Him.13

The being of the persons is not really distinct from that of the divine nature, and thus the persons cannot relate to the essence as species to a genus or as individuals to a species.

Herman Bavinck notes that God’s unity of singularity means “that there is but one divine being, that in virtue of the nature of that being God cannot be more than one being and, consequently, that all other beings exist only from him, through him, and to him.”15

Whatever is in God is ontologically identical to His divine nature.

The Puritan William Ames makes clear that we do not maintain a generic unity among the persons, declaring, “He is said to be one not in kind, but in that perfect unity which is often called numerical and individual in creatures.”25

classical trinitarians insist that the real distinction is not between the persons and the divine essence, but only among the persons themselves.

Yet the three persons are really distinct. How so? Classical Christian theists generally locate this distinction in personal relations or, in slightly more imprecise language, “several peculiar relative properties.” Specifically, it is in relations that we locate the real distinctions of paternity (unique to the Father), filiation or begottenness (unique to the Son), and spirated procession (unique to the Spirit).

So what are the persons?

Traditionally, many have claimed that the persons are nothing but the relations (paternity, filiation, procession) subsisting in the Godhead.

As John Owen puts it, “A divine person is nothing but the divine essence…subsisting in an especial manner.”

But in God, relations are not features of His being that exist over and above His substance. They add nothing to the substance. They are not principles of actuality adjoined to the divine essence that determine it to exist in some sense, as if the essence were something abstract that is then made concrete in the persons. In God, there is no mixture of abstract and concrete. We are forced to speak of God’s essence under the rubric of substance terminology and relation terminology, which Augustine calls “substance-wise” and “relationship-wise.”

nothing. Some desire to make the doctrine of the Trinity more practical by envisioning it as a blueprint for human relations and society,41 and this social practicality would surely be obscured if one were to apply the logic of divine simplicity to the account of God’s tripersonal existence.

While there are diverse motives for making the doctrine of the Trinity more comprehensible, the one thing that seems to bind most recent theistic mutualist accounts together is the replacement of God’s simple unity with some version of composite unity.

social trinitarianism.

Possibly the most influential advocate of social trinitarianism in recent decades has been the Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann. He is concerned that the older trinitarianism that conceives the three persons as three distinct manners of subsistence of the one divine substance erects an unacceptable God-behind-God scenario and is too near to the Sabellian heresy.42 He prefers instead to conceive the unity of the Godhead as the product of the perichoretic fellowship of the three persons. Perichoresis is the ancient teaching that argues that each of the three persons indwells and is interior to the others. Such is reflected in Jesus’s words in John 14:11, “I am in the Father and the Father in Me.” Each person has its distinct identity and being wholly in relation to the other two. Moltmann wants to say that this network of relations just is the unity of the Godhead. “In respect of the Trinity’s inner life,” he writes, “the three Persons themselves form their unity, by virtue of their relation to one another and in the eternal perichoresis of their love.”

I do not see how this avoids the very modalistic/sabellian heresy he seeks to dodge?? It seems that he fails to make the proper distinction between person/being of God and man, by conflating the human beings function in relationships with God as being in an eternal and unchanging sense, i.e.; His essence of divinity, which is eternal. Thus, he still has God acting in modes, or as some have put it, as the one actor putting on different mask. He just makes the concepts of relationships and love the foundation for the Godhead's unity, not the Divine essence...I think this is a bait-and switch

One also finds a proclivity for social trinitarianism among some recent Calvinist theologians. Cornelius Plantinga Jr., for instance, is concerned that the Augustinian tradition’s assertion that God has a singular mind, will, love, and action—each of these being aspects of the one simple divine substance—eclipses the true personhood of the Father, Son, and Spirit.

What are we to make of social trinitarianism? It either says too much or too little. On the one hand, it says too much when each person is conceived as having a distinct essence and will of its own. One wonders how this is not the identification of three distinct beings or primary substances. On the other hand, it says too little when it denies that any particular person is possessed of the entire divine essence, the one divine substance.