distinction between God’s essence, which is simple and unchangeable, and God’s will, which
being free does not will everything eternally and does not always will the same thing.26
Much more serious even is the opposition to God’s immutability from the side of pantheism.
Common to all pantheistic criticism is that the idea of becoming is transferred to God, thus totally
obliterating the boundary line between the Creator and the creature. The idea of God as
“substance,” as it occurs in Spinoza, proved to be an abstraction devoid of content. In order to
breathe life into that concept, philosophy frequently substituted “becoming” for “being.” In that
connection it makes a big difference, naturally, whether or not this process—by which God
himself comes into being—is conceived in unitarian or trinitarian terms and whether it is viewed
as occurring immanently in the being of God or transitively in the world. Belonging in this
category are, first of all, Gnosticism, but further also the theosophy of the Kabbalah, of Böhme,
Schelling, Rothe, Hamberger, and others, having an aftereffect in the doctrine of kenosis, and
finally the pantheistic philosophy of Fichte, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Schopenhauer, vonHartmann,
and others. However variously it may be elaborated, the basic idea is the same: God is not, but
becomes. In and of himself, in the initial moment, he is an “unknown oceanic depth (
βυθος
ἀ
γνωστος
),” purely abstract potential being, unqualified nature, contentless idea, a dark
brooding urge, a blind alogical will—in a word, a form of being that is nothing but can become
anything. But from that mass of potential existence, in the form of a process, God gradually heaves
himself into actuality. He is his own Creator. He produces himself. Very gradually, either within
himself or in the world, he matures into personality, self-consciousness, mind, spirit.
Under the influence of this philosophical idea of the Absolute becoming, also modern theology
has repeatedly denied or delimited the immutability of God and with a passion favored calling
God his own cause (causa sui), a self-actualizing power.27 As Luthardt puts it: “God is his own
deed.”28 Others speak of “God’s self-postulation.”29 In a special treatise Dorner, attempting to
avoid both Deism and pantheism (acosmism), sought to reconcile God’s immutability and his
“aliveness.”30 He believes he can achieve this goal by locating God’s immutability in the
dimension of the ethical. Ethically, God is immutable and always self-consistent. He remains holy
love. But for the rest, Dorner believes that as a result of the creation, the incarnation, and the
atonement, a change has come about in God; that he stands in a reciprocal relation to humankind,
that he only knows reality from his interaction with the world. This means that for God, too, there
is a past, a present, and a future; that he becomes angry, justifies; and that in general his disposition
corresponds to that of humans.31 Many theologians on the doctrine of God also refrain from
speaking about this important attribute but on the doctrine of creation, or the incarnation, or the
kenosis only let their readers know that they accept mutability in God (Ebrard, Hofmann,
Thomasius, von Oettingen, et al.).
Nevertheless, the doctrine of God’s immutability is highly significant for religion. The difference
between the Creator and the creature hinges on the contrast between being and becoming. All
