In my hiatal state, I've been dwelling on this conundrum of God's supposed immutability. We've discussed it in the past, but for some reason the subject has lately been coming back to haunt me. So I reread a number of dissenting voices, including Charles Hartshorne's The Divine Relativity.
Harthsorne has a lot of ideas with which I profoundly disagree, but on those which we do agree, we really agree. Here are some plagiaphrased passages from the book, presented mostly without comment.
--Divine relativity is not only compatible with, but equivalent to, an aspect of divine absoluteness. The Absolute is God with something left out of account. The Absolute is, rather, an abstract feature of the inclusive and supreme reality which is precisely the personal God.
--The higher one goes in the scale of being, the more obviously do the social aspects assume a primary role. Does this point to the conclusion that the supreme being is not social at all?
--God, if social, is eminently or supremely so. For all other beings limit their compassion at some point. I assert that the closest to zero dependence would occur at the bottom, not the top of the scale of beings. The closer we get to a "merely material" individual, the closer we come to something for which nearly all the changes in the universe make no appreciable difference at all.
--God is socially aware, period.
--Sympathetic dependence is a sign of excellence and increases with every ascent in the scale of being. What does it mean to know what sorrow is, but never to have sorrowed, never to have felt the quality of suffering?
--The eminent form of sympathetic dependence can only apply to deity, for this form cannot be less than OMNISCIENT SYMPATHY.
--Conversely, it is the tyrant who depends as little as possible, ideally not at all, upon the wills and fortunes of others. Likewise, the father who as little as possible depends upon the will and welfare of his child is an inhuman monster.
--Yet God, we are told, is impassive and immutable and without accidents, and is therefore just as he would be had we never existed, or had all our experiences been otherwise.
--Suppose I can be equally happy and serene and joyous regardless of how men and women suffer around me. Shall we admire this alleged independence? I think not. Why should we admire it when it is alleged of God?
--The relative or changeable exceeds the nonrelative, immutable or absolute, as the concrete includes and exceeds the abstract.
--A personal God is one who has social relations and thus is constituted by relationships and hence is relative.
--What is a person if not a being qualified and conditioned by social relations, relations to other persons? And what is God if not the supreme case of personality? Either God really does love all beings, that is, is related to them by a sympathetic union surpassing all human sympathy, or religion seems a vast fraud.
--To say, on the one hand, that God is love, and on the other, to speak of an absolute, infinite, immutable, impassive deity, seems a gigantic hoax.
--God has qualities that are accidental, that do not follow from any necessity of his essence.
--It simply cannot be that everything in God is necessary, including his knowledge that this world exists, unless the world is in the same sense necessary and there is no contingency whatsoever.
--If God is wholly absolute, it follows that God does not know or love or will us, his creatures.
Either he has relative being, and then we might know it, or he has only absolute being, in which case only He could know it.
--The perfect being either does, or does not, include the totality of imperfect things. If the perfect does not include the totality of imperfect things, then this total reality is a greater reality than the perfect alone.
Bottom line(s):
For God to do what I do when I decide my own act is mere nonsense, words without meaning. It is not my act if anyone else decides or performs it...
[I]t is impossible that our act should be both free and yet a logical consequence of divine action which "infallibly" produces its effect. Power to cause someone to perform by his own choice an act precisely defined by the cause is meaningless.
The notion of a cosmic power that determines all decisions fails to make sense. For its decisions could refer to nothing except themselves. they could result in no world; for a world must consist of local agents making their own decisions
Therefore,
Maximizing relativity as well as absoluteness in God enables us to conceive him as the supreme person.
Conversely, if God be in all aspects absolute, then literally it is "all the same" to him, a matter of utter indifference. This is precisely not to be personal in any way relevant to religion or ethics. A wholly absolute God is power divorced from responsiveness or sensitivity.
Me? I think the whole mess can be cleaned up by looking at things through the lenses of Trinity and Incarnation.
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