Theologia et Vita

Does God Change His Mind? Divine Constancy and Contingency in the Old Testament J. Neil Daniels Introduction: The Puzzle of a Repenting God The Bible does something rather unsettling. On one page it insists that God “is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should repent” (Num 23:19). Flip a few pages, and you find Him doing precisely that: “The Lord changed His mind about the harm which He said He would do to His people” (Exod 32:14). One verse portrays God’s purposes as unshakeable, another depicts Him as responsive, even reactive, to human behavior. Classical theologians from Augustine to Aquinas have leaned hard on the first set of texts to safeguard divine immutability. Yet the second set won’t go away. They stubbornly remain, unsettling neat systematic categories and demanding a more careful reading of Scripture itself. Robert B. Chisholm Jr.’s 1995 study “Does God ‘Change His Mind’?” remains one of the most incisive treatments of this tension, and it will s...

The Fire That Burns Without Consuming: Exploring the Divine Nature J. Neil Daniels Introduction: The Weight of a Single Thought “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” A. W. Tozer’s famous line is more than a preacher’s flourish; it is a distillation of centuries of theological wrestling. It suggests that our concept of God is not a private opinion but a shaping force, bending the arc of our lives and even our civilizations. Augustine would have agreed. “You have made us for yourself,” he wrote at the dawn of the fifth century, “and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” The question “What is God like?” is not an idle curiosity. It is a question that reaches into the marrow of what it means to be human. But the question is notoriously difficult. God is not a specimen we can place beneath a microscope, nor a planet we can observe through a telescope. As John of Damascus warned in the eighth century, “God is without beginning, w...