The Doctrine of God: Classical Theism and Its Critics

The doctrine of God, also called theology proper, is the part of Christian theology that studies God Himself: His existence, His attributes, the Trinity, His relation to the world, His providence and His eternal decree. For most of church history the classical doctrine of God taught that God is simple, unchanging, eternal and without passions. In the twentieth century that teaching came under sustained attack from theologians who read the Bible's responsive God as a God who changes. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) keeps the classical doctrine whole where process theism and open theism revise it, and adds one rule: every claim about God is indexed to the frame it is made in.

Key takeaways

• Theology proper has six loci. They are existence, attributes, Trinity, creation, providence and decree, and every other doctrine inherits what is said about them.
• The classical attributes come as a package. Simplicity, immutability, eternity and impassibility support one another, so giving up one strains the rest.
• The modern revisions keep the responsive God by spending an attribute. Process theism, open theism and William Lane Craig's hybrid view each pay a different price.
• FICT keeps both. Where process theism and open theism revise the doctrine, it affirms the classical doctrine and the Bible's responsive God by locating each claim in God's own frame or in our finite, human frame.

What is the doctrine of God?

Theology proper, or the doctrine of God, is the sub-discipline of systematic theology that deals with God's being, attributes and works. It is "proper" because it is theology in the strict sense of the word: talk about God (theos), rather than about salvation, the church or the last things. Christians divide the subject in different ways, but six loci recur in nearly every serious treatment.

The first is God's existence: whether there is a God, and what the arguments for Him, such as the argument from contingency, already imply about Him. The second is His attributes, the perfections Scripture and reason ascribe to Him, from omnipotence to omnipresence, often sorted into communicable and incommunicable attributes. The third is the Trinity, one God in three persons, a subject large enough to need its own treatment. The fourth is God's relation to the world, beginning with creation ex nihilo and the question of why God created at all. The fifth is providence, His upholding and governing of all things, covered in our article on divine providence. The sixth is His decree, the eternal purpose behind everything that happens, which is where the debates over the sovereignty of God live.

The order is not arbitrary. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae walks the same road: the existence of God at Question 2, His simplicity at Question 3, immutability and eternity at Questions 9 and 10, providence at Question 22, the divine persons from Question 27 to 43, creation from Question 44, and the government of the world at Question 103. Each locus leans on the one before it.

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That is why the doctrine of God reaches beyond the seminary. What we say about prayer, evil, freedom and salvation is downstream of what we have already said about God.

Volume One of the Many Beings series shows what follows for human freedom once God is described precisely; download it free.

How was the classical doctrine of God built?

The classical doctrine began with texts that ground Israel's hope in a God who does not change:

"I the LORD do not change; so you, O descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed." (Malachi 3:6, NIV)

The prophet reasons from God's changelessness to the survival of a people who had given Him every reason to abandon them. James carries the same attribute into the New Covenant as the reason God's giving can be trusted:

"Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows." (James 1:17, NIV)

The genealogy through Greek philosophy is real and should be met openly. Plato held that the perfect cannot change without falling from perfection, and Aristotle's Unmoved Mover was perfect at the price of being unable to relate. The church's teachers took the vocabulary and changed what it served. Augustine confessed a God "never new, never old," who stands beyond the succession of the times He made and yet creates, calls and redeems within them. Boethius, writing in prison, gave the doctrine of eternity its definition: "the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life" (Consolation of Philosophy V.6).

Aquinas gave the doctrine its classical precision. God is pure act (actus purus), with no unrealized potential, and therefore unchangeable; His essence is His existence, which grounds divine simplicity; He exists of Himself, which is the doctrine of aseity. To the objection that a God who creates must acquire a new relation, Aquinas answered that "in God there is no real relation to creatures, but a relation only in idea" (Summa Theologiae I, q.13, a.7): the relation is real in the creature, which gains everything, and God acquires nothing. The school that carried his system forward is traced in our article on Thomism.

The Reformation did not dismantle this. The Lutheran and Reformed scholastics systematized the attributes, and Francis Turretin distinguished archetypal theology, God's knowledge of Himself, from ectypal theology, the true but creaturely knowledge given to us. Calvin read the relenting narratives as accommodation: God speaking to sequential creatures in sequential terms. The Westminster Confession gathered the result into a sentence that is still the classic statement, describing God as "a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty," whose decree ordains "freely, and unchangeably" whatever comes to pass.

The attributes were held as a whole. If God has no parts, nothing in Him can be rearranged, so He cannot change; if He cannot change, He has no succession, so He is eternal; if nothing can be done to Him, He is without passions. Each one holds the others in place.

Volume Four, Resolving Immutability & Interaction, traces this history and tests each link in the package.

Why did the twentieth century turn against it?

The twentieth century turned against the classical doctrine on historical, philosophical and devotional grounds at once, and the three are best kept apart.

The first was historical. Adolf von Harnack's History of Dogma (1885 to 1890 in German) argued that Christian dogma was "a work of the Greek spirit on the soil of the gospel." On this Hellenization thesis, the God of the creeds is Aristotle's God described in biblical language, and the God of Scripture is someone more passionate and more involved.

The second was philosophical. In 1966 Norman Kretzmann argued that a God who knows everything must know what is happening now, and since what is happening now keeps changing, an omniscient God must keep changing. Process theism, the school that grew from Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy, went further: God is dipolar, with a primordial nature that envisages every possibility and a consequent nature that receives the world as it happens. In the summary of the Stanford Encyclopedia, "God is affected by what affects the creatures," and God acts by persuasion rather than coercion.

The third was devotional, and it spread widest. By 1986 Ronald Goetz could write in the Christian Century that "The ancient theopaschite heresy that God suffers has, in fact, become the new orthodoxy." Barth, Bonhoeffer, Brunner and Pannenberg were among the names on his list. The questions this raised now have their own pages: does God suffer, and whether God has emotions.

Analytic philosophers of religion pressed the attributes one at a time. Alvin Plantinga objected in 1980 that if God is identical with His properties, He is Himself a property. In 1994 Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker and David Basinger published The Openness of God, and open theism held, in the Internet Encyclopedia's summary, that "Though omniscient, God does not know what we will freely do in the future." Whether God knows the future became a question inside the evangelical church.

William Lane Craig revised the classical attributes from inside a deep respect for them. On his view God is timeless without creation and temporal since creation; His existence, character and purposes never change, while His knowledge of what is happening now moves with the world; and he declines the strong Thomist doctrine of simplicity on the grounds that it makes God incomprehensible and fits poorly with the God who reveals Himself as loving and personal. R. T. Mullins's The End of the Timeless God (2016) pressed further still. Brian Davies popularized a name for the family of views that treat God as a person among persons and reject simplicity: theistic personalism. Whether God is a person in that sense is now a live question.

Volume Three, Resolving Time & Eternity, takes up the temporal arguments, Craig's above all.

What is the strongest case for the classical doctrine of God?

The classical theist's first argument is that only the classical God is the Creator rather than the largest creature. A God composed of parts depends on His parts; a God who changes depends on whatever changes Him. Simplicity and aseity keep God from being one more being among beings, which is the concern behind the language of God as the ground of being and the charge of ontotheology that the classical tradition answers.

The second argument is pastoral. Malachi grounds Israel's survival in God's changelessness, and Balaam explains why he could not curse Israel:

"God is not a man, that he should lie, nor a son of man, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?" (Numbers 23:19, NIV)

A God who could be moved off His word could have been bought. The promises are secure because the One who made them cannot drift.

The third argument concerns explanation. A God with parts invites the question of what holds the parts together, and a God who changes invites the question of what moves Him. A simple, unchanging God is where explanation stops, because there is nothing in Him that could be explained by something prior. That is why the classical doctrine makes God the answer to why anything exists at all.

The fourth argument is continuity. The doctrine is the common inheritance of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther's heirs and Westminster, and the Hellenization thesis has not survived scrutiny well: Paul Gavrilyuk's The Suffering of the Impassible God (2004) has argued at length that the fathers used impassibility in a restricted sense, as a qualifier of divine emotions, and that the theory of theology's fall into Hellenistic philosophy fails on the patristic evidence.

The revisers press three weaknesses. A relation that is real in the creature and "only in idea" in God sounds like a relationship real for one party and notional for the other. Reading "the LORD relented" as accommodation can drain the narrative of what it reports. And a timeless God seems unable to know what time it is now: He may know every date, the revisers argue, but not that this moment is the present one.

What is the strongest case for the revisionist doctrines?

The revisers' first argument is the text. At Sinai, after Moses interceded, "the LORD relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened" (Exodus 32:14, NIV). At Nineveh:

"When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened." (Jonah 3:10, NIV)

These are not decorative figures. Intercession is presented as mattering to what follows, and a reading that drains the response of reality has not tidied the passage but emptied it.

Their second argument is prayer: if nothing we ask makes a difference to God, petition is a devotional exercise. The third is love: to love is, among other things, to be affected by the beloved, and a love that nothing could touch looks less like love than like benevolence at a distance. The fourth is that the God of the Bible is personal, and His attributes should read as a person's attributes, not a principle's. Craig's worry about simplicity belongs here. If God lies beyond every concept we have, the revisers ask, what do we know when we say that He loves us, and whom are we worshiping when we name Him? A relationship that is real for us and a polite fiction for God would be unworthy of the God who calls Abraham His friend.

Classical theists press back, and their objections land. A God enriched by the world was poorer without it, so process theism's God is not complete in Himself and not free in creating. A God who does not know what free creatures will do keeps His promises by skill, and His prophecies become forecasts that happened to hold. Craig's hybrid has God pass from timelessness into time, and his own description of God without creation, changeless and without sequence, looks very like the timeless state he set aside. And a person among persons, however great, is a magnified creature. Whether God can change His mind is the test case where both critiques meet.

Why are theologians returning to the classical view?

In the 2010s and 2020s the tide turned, chiefly because the package argument, that the classical attributes stand or fall together, was pressed again with force. James Dolezal's All That Is in God (2017) named the modern compromise "theistic mutualism" and called evangelical theology back to classical Christian theism. Jordan Barrett's Divine Simplicity (2017) defended the doctrine on biblical and Trinitarian grounds. Scholastic theology, Protestant and Catholic, is read again with sympathy, and Eastern discussions of the essence and energies of God have joined the conversation.

Dolezal argues that simplicity and immutability entail one another, so a theologian who gives up one should expect to lose both, and the history of the twentieth century bears him out: Craig declined strict simplicity in the same movement that gave God a temporal life. The stakes are confessional as well as philosophical, since churches that subscribe to Westminster confess a God "without body, parts, or passions" in their own standards. The retrieval has restored the doctrine's coherence and its pedigree, and it has reminded a generation that the classical attributes form a single account of who God is.

What it has done less well is answer the relational objection on the revisers' own ground. Its reply is usually the doctrine of mixed relations and the doctrine of accommodation, restated with more care, and those are the replies the revisers had already found thin. Mullins and others have kept pressing, and the debate is sharpening, not settling.

Why does the dispute over the doctrine of God never close?

The dispute does not close because the two sides are describing God from different places. The theistic personalist reads God from our finite, human frame and makes real points from there. It does not seem to make sense that God possesses all of time in one eternal now, the nunc stans, and also engages with us in time. From where we stand, those look mutually exclusive.

The classical theist reads God from His own frame. If God's frame of reference is different in kind from ours, as the Creator differs in kind from the creature, He can hold His own perception and ours at the same time, and nothing is contradicted.

Both sides then make the same move. Each takes a word, such as change, relation, now or know, and assumes it must mean exactly the same thing whether it is said of God or of us. The Many Beings series calls this the Many Beings Fallacy: carrying a frame-bound word across from one kind of being to another without its index.

Scripture does not make the move. In one chapter it says:

"He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind; for he is not a man, that he should change his mind." (1 Samuel 15:29, NIV)

Six verses later it says, "And the LORD was grieved that he had made Saul king over Israel" (1 Samuel 15:35, NIV). The writer sets the two side by side without apology.

Volume One builds this diagnosis from two axioms, step by step; get the free copy.

How does Frame-Indexed Classical Theism resolve the dispute?

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that dissolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single formal error: a frame-bound term carried across the Creator-creature divide without its index. Against theistic personalism and open theism, it affirms the classical doctrine of God whole: nothing in the Westminster sentence is softened. Against classical theism read without an index, it affirms the Bible's responsive God at full strength. It adds one rule: index every claim to the frame it is made in.

Applied to the disputed pairs, the rule does its work quickly. God does not change His mind in His own frame, and He truly relents in ours, where His one eternal purpose meets Nineveh's repentance in sequence. God possesses His life whole and at once, and He engages us moment by moment, because our frame receives His one act as a succession. God is simple, and we know Him under many perfections, as one light is received through a prism as many colors. God is not moved by passions, and His affections toward us are real and full, as our article on divine emotion argues at length.

This answers Craig at his strongest point. His argument holds that a God really related to a temporal world must be temporal. FICT grants that the relation is real and denies that a real relation requires both parties to share one mode of time. The relation is real in the creature, whose free acts give it its content, and really held by God, who holds it eternally. The future is open in our frame, as open theism insists, and settled in God's knowledge, as classical theism insists, which is why God can be omniscient without making our choices for us.

That protects the two things the revisers rightly feared to lose: our freedom, which Resolving the Free Will Dilemma defends in full, and our relationship with God. God has these attributes in His own frame, and that is why they cost us nothing in ours: His eternity does not crowd out our time, and His knowledge does not fix our choices. The indexing has one guardrail. God beholds the whole of created time, but He is not contained in it or composed of it; the indexing never collapses God into the world.

The books' image for this is a cathedral: the masters built it, and FICT supplies the load calculations. Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas and Turretin asserted the eternal present, the mixed relation and the creaturely reception. FICT derives them, and in deriving them shows why the objections of process theism, open theism and Craig's hybrid view arise and where each one goes wrong.

It can also be caught out. Volume Four names three conditions that would overturn it: if the Incarnation required a real change in the divine nature; if one eternal act could not ground distinct temporal effects; or if simplicity and the plurality of the attributes stayed incompatible after indexing.

Volume One, free to download, sets out the axioms the whole series stands on; start there.

How the positions compare

Frequently asked questions

Is theology proper the same as the doctrine of God?

Yes. Theology proper and the doctrine of God are two names for one locus of systematic theology: the study of God's existence, attributes, Trinity, works, providence and decree, as distinct from the doctrines of Christ, salvation or the church.

Is the classical doctrine of God just Greek philosophy?

The vocabulary owes a debt to Plato and Aristotle, and the church's teachers said so. The warrant is Scripture: Malachi 3:6, James 1:17 and Numbers 23:19 teach God's changelessness directly. The Hellenization thesis has been contested at length, notably by Paul Gavrilyuk.

What is the difference between classical theism and theistic personalism?

Classical theism holds that God is simple, unchanging and eternal. Theistic personalism holds that God is a person like us in kind, though perfect, and usually rejects simplicity. The attributes of God hub walks each disputed attribute in turn.

Does the doctrine of God affect how I pray?

Directly. If God cannot be moved, prayer can seem pointless; if He can, His promises can seem negotiable. Where open theism makes prayer revise God's plans and an unindexed classical theism can make it look idle, FICT holds that your prayer is a real cause within God's one eternal purpose, so you pray to a God who hears and cannot fail.

Isn't indexing claims to frames just relativism?

No. Relativism says truth depends on the speaker. Frame-indexing says one reality is known whole in God's frame and truly, in part, in ours. Logic and arithmetic mean the same in both frames.

The Many Beings series carries this argument through freedom, evil, time and immutability. Volume One is free: download Resolving the Free Will Dilemma and begin where the series begins.