In the sixth discourse of Stephen Charnock’s Existence and Attributes of God, he utilizes six “propositions” to anticipate or directly answer objections to divine immutability on the basis of some special cases or difficulties.

There was no change in God when (1) He made the world; (2) the Word became flesh; (3) the Bible depicts Him as “turning,” or as displaying some associated affection; (4) a contrary outcome results than that prophesied or warned about; (5) an object of his wrath becomes an object of his love, or he is said to be displeased with an object of his love; and (6) God abrogates some laws or enacts others.

Yet when we read the Scriptures, we often come up to passages that seem to suggest that God is undergoing some change, either in His inner life or in some relation He now possesses toward the creation. Often it is not a particular text that causes us to think God must change. Sometimes it is an inference that we draw given some other truth. Charnock would show us that such inferences are false. We proceed to these six objections in the order that they appear in Discourse 6. Note that each heading (the objection itself) is framed in my own language.

Objection 1. “If God created the world, then since there was a point when the world was uncreated and then another when it was created, it follows that some state in God changed.”

In arguing that the change of creation occurred entirely in the creation, but not in God, Charnock introduces a distinction between active creation versus passive creation. Recall his argument about the relationship between eternal knowledge and the temporal objects of that knowledge. Which is the cause of which? We saw that God knows by Himself. He knows what He wills and wills what He knows. Hence, the object of God’s knowledge (that is, a thing which is not God) cannot be the cause of God’s knowing it, much less of His determining it. Here that is applied to the state of change in causing a thing:

“Active creation is the will and power of God to create. This is from eternity, because God willed from eternity to create in time. This never had beginning, for God never began in time to understand anything, to will anything, or to be able to do anything, but he always understood and always willed those things that he determined from eternity to produce in time.”1

This is crucial to keep in mind when we encounter language about God’s will or decree, whether in Scripture or in theological discourse, as “The decree of God may be taken for the act of decreeing, which is eternal and the same, or for the object decreed, which is in time—so that there may be a change in the object but not in the will whereby the object does exist.”2 So there is neither a new will nor a new power in God in creating a thing outside of Himself. As the workings of “all things” are said to be according to the counsel of His will (Eph. 1:11), executed at a fullness of time (Eph. 1:9), from before the foundations of the world (Eph. 1:4). He ends his reply to this first objection with an important point for this and the following objection.

There is also no “new relation acquired by God” in this act of creation. For example, while we call God both “Creator” and “Lord,” these words signify a relation between cause and effect and not a property belonging to God’s essence. He borrows an illustration from Augustine, of a coin that is used either as payment or as a pledge for something borrowed. Note that “the coin is the same and is not changed, though the relation it had as a pledge and as a price be different from one another.”3

Objection 2. “If the Son of God became flesh, then it is not merely that He created the human nature, but that His Person was united to this human nature and thus His state changed.”

First, he appeals to the credal language, so that the objector can at least know his target. He usually does not. “There was a union of the two natures but no change of the Deity into the humanity or of the humanity into the Deity: both preserved their particular properties.”4 However, it will still be said, this union of two that do not change into the other, although they may not be confused, yet the reality of the union, the effect of it—this is still a change of states from non-united to united, since the one Person (the Son) is still said to be the acting subject in the words “the Word became flesh.”

Here is where that distinction about a new relation comes in from the first objection. In more modern philosophy we have a distinction that helps us explain this. It is called a “Cambridge change,”5 so named because the two philosophers who articulated this notion taught there. I will illustrate with an example. If my son becomes taller than my wife, then my wife has become shorter than my son. But did she “become” a different property ontologically, or only as to a logical relationship? Clearly the change was only in the latter relationship. Now applying the correct idea to divine immutability, if God creates a world, He is now said to be “Creator,” and rightly so. However the change in this “addition of an attribute” to God is actually not an ontological addition or change at all to God. It is rather a logical distinction made between God’s essence and the new creature in which all of the change occurs. Such a property acquired is referred to as a “Cambridge property.” However, when speaking of God, the whole notion of “properties” is a misnomer, as that assumes composition in God.

Charnock uses an illustration of his own:

“The glory of his divinity was neither extinguished nor diminished, though it was obscured and darkened under the veil of our infirmities, but there was no more change in the hiding of it than there is in the body of the sun when it is shadowed by the interposition of a cloud.”6

Philippians 2:7 comes to mind. The Greek word kenosis may be translated as an “emptying himself” or “becoming as nothing,” yet even here, the biblical author is utilizing that same analogical speech that we have to on a daily basis. When we ask, perhaps as new believers, what “happened” to the Trinity during the incarnation, the proper answer is nothing. The divine was not subtracted from. The human was united to—and while that might involve an infinite mystery, it violates no law of logic. Only the human nature became.

Objection 3. “If God thinks or feels contrary to any of his original plans, purposes, or preferences, then God changes in his inner life.”

The classic so-called prooftexts for these are examined; and we will notice an overlap between the third and fourth objections.

“and if [a nation] does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will relent of the good that I had intended to do to it”  (Jer. 18:10).

“And the LORD relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people” (Ex. 32:14)

“When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it” (Jon. 3:10).

“And the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Gen. 6:6)

Charnock answers with three truths already well established: “1. Repentance is not properly in God … 2. But God accommodates himself in the Scripture to our weak capacity … 3. Therefore, repentance in God is only a change of his outward conduct, according to his infallible foresight and immutable will.”7 He offers an explanation:

“Repentance in us is a grief for a former fact and a changing of our course in it; grief is not in God, but his repentance is a willing a thing should not be as it was, which will was fixed from eternity. For God, foreseeing man would fall and decreeing to permit it, he could not be said to repent in time of what he did not repent from eternity, and therefore, if there were no repentance in God from eternity, there could be none in time. But God is said to repent when he changes the disposition of affairs without himself; as men, when they repent, alter the course of their actions, so God alters things, extra se, or ‘without himself,’ but changes nothing of his own purpose within himself.”8

We can work this out easily enough about the texts often cited. Although it may read as an awkward expression, Charnock’s phrase “his repentance is a willing a thing should not be as it was,” we must fix in our minds that this “thing … as it was” was a thing in time.

Consequently, God is highlighting a regrettable thing on the timeline, singling it out for our moral disapprobation in conformity with His. The idolatry of both the Israelites in the wilderness and the pagans in Nineveh was subject to destruction given their non-repentance, yet the people were subject to forgiveness given God’s mercy plus their repentance. The divergence between those two is for our consideration toward moral action—not for our blasphemous speculation that God could be stuck at that same crossroad.

Objection 4. “If God would have done x, but instead has done y—and this difference was affected by the response of the creature, then it follows that the creature’s act changes the will or decree of God.”

The episode of Nineveh’s repentance is brought back in here because, not only is it a case of God’s inner life seemingly on display, but now the so-called “counterfactual” itself is in fuller view. In addition to Jonah 3, Charnock also mentions the case of Hezekiah having fifteen years added to his life in 2 Kings 20:1-5 and Isaiah 38:1-5, as well as the mercy described in,

“The soul who sins shall die. The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son. The righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself. But if a wicked person turns away from all his sins that he has committed and keeps all my statutes and does what is just and right, he shall surely live; he shall not die” (Ezk. 18:20-21).

This at least seems to overturn the settled judgment of God upon the generations of those who hate him (cf. Ex. 20:5). Charnock puts the design of this accommodating speech in another way, “that though God does not punish, his will is not changed, because his will was to declare the demerit of sin and his right to punish upon the commission of it.”9

This will to declare refers to God’s will for the fullest, profitable revelation to us. He could have simply revealed the account of their turning to God by showing only the happy ending. But though that would be profitable, the full account of sin, judgment, repentance, and mercy was all the more profitable. That Nineveh should be destroyed is “the general rule,”10 and God wanted to highlight both His rule and His mercy.

Objection 5. “If God loves who He once hated, or becomes displeased with whom He has begun to love, then it follows that God changes emotional states.”

Here, he lists only verses that show God’s settled essence, and then expounds on how this oneness in God issues forth into these changes concerning the creature. But we could think of two places—one which speaks of the difference in God’s disposition toward unbelievers versus believers; another which speaks of God’s seeming to become displeased with one already a believer.

“Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him” (Jn. 3:36).

“And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption” (Eph. 4:30).

Consider the difference between two ‘d’ words—disposition and dispensation—as all such passages are communicating to us a change is dispensation but not a change in divine disposition.

“The reason of his various dispensations to them was the same in both, as considered in God, his immutable holiness; but as respecting the creature, different; the nature of the creature was changed, but the divine, holy nature of God remained the same … Though the same angels were not always loved, yet the same reason that moved him to love them move him to hate them.”11

This is important theologically. In other words, God would contradict God if this were not so. Here is how Charnock puts it:

“It had been [would be] a mutable affection in God to [if He did] love that which was not worthy of love with the same love wherewith he loved that which had the greatest resemblance to himself; had God loved the fallen angels in that state and for that state, he had hated himself, because he had loved that which was contrary to himself and the image of his own holiness, which made them appear before good in his sight.”12

If this is not carefully read, another predictable misunderstanding may emerge. Charnock is not saying that God cannot love the unloveable in any sense—“not that we had loved God” (1 Jn. 4:10)—but that gracious love is subordinate to that love with which God loves in Himself: “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you” (Jer. 31:3). The point is rather that God cannot love any single thing except to the extent that it bears true witness to His whole glory in proportion to the nature of the thing. But as to the difference between the object of His love or hate, and the oneness of the divine stance, Charnock asks rhetorically,

“Is the sun changed when it hardens one thing and softens another, according to the disposition of the severe subjects? Or when the sun makes a flower more fragrant and a dead carcass more noisome?”13

Likewise with the cross of Christ in its relation to this multi-layered stream of causality: “so the will of God for the punishment of sin or the reconciliation of the sinner was no new will—though his wrath in time break out in the effects of it upon sinners, and his love flows out in the effects of it upon penitents.”14

Objection 6. “If God changes His own law—either by abrogating what was commanded or commanding something new—then God’s moral will changes.”

Along the lines of Paul’s language to the Galatians, Charnock says here, “God commanded one thing to the Jews when the church was in an infant state and removed those laws when the church came to some growth.”15 He uses the example of Christ not teaching everything all at once to the disciples, and a physician withholding and prescribing different medicines to his patients—both of which have this in common, that the diverse times and temperaments of those receiving called for it. But neither the ultimate will nor the skill of the giver was altered. As to the law, “He decreed to command it, but he decreed to command it only for such a time, so that the abrogation of it was no less an execution of his decree than the establishment of it for a season was.”16

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1. The Existence and Attributes of God, I:502-03.

2. The Existence and Attributes of God, I:503.

3. The Existence and Attributes of God, I:505-06

4. The Existence and Attributes of God, I:506.

5. cf. Edward Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), 196.

6. The Existence and Attributes of God, I:506.

7. The Existence and Attributes of God, I:507, 508.

8. The Existence and Attributes of God, I:509.

9. The Existence and Attributes of God, I:510.

10. The Existence and Attributes of God, I:511.

11. The Existence and Attributes of God, I:513

12. The Existence and Attributes of God, I:514.

13. The Existence and Attributes of God, I:514.

14. The Existence and Attributes of God, I:514.

15. The Existence and Attributes of God, I:515.

16. The Existence and Attributes of God, I:515.