Theistic Personalism vs Classical Theism: Both Steelmanned

Theistic personalism is the family of views that understands God as a personal agent whose knowing, willing, relating and feeling mean the same thing, or nearly the same thing, as ours, so that God is in time, responsive to His creatures, and not simple. Classical theism, the position of Augustine, Boethius and Aquinas, answers that God is simple, eternal and immutable, and that our personal words reach Him by analogy. We argue that each side is right about the frame it reads God from, the personalist from our finite, human frame and the classical theist from God's own, and that Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) keeps what both theistic personalism and unindexed classical theism see. The answer decides how an eternal God can hear a prayer tonight, and how He can know all things without overriding our freedom or our relationship with Him.

Key takeaways

• Theistic personalism treats divine personhood as univocal or nearly univocal with ours. Brian Davies popularised the label; its central mark is rejecting divine simplicity, and timelessness and impassibility usually follow.
• The theistic personalist is right that relationship, response and feeling are real. Scripture narrates a God who grieves, relents and draws near, and William Lane Craig argues that a God who acts in time must be temporal.
• The classical theist is right that a God in time, assembled from properties and changed by creatures, is not the Creator. Simplicity, aseity, eternity and immutability protect God's perfection, His independence and the certainty of His promises.
• Each side's best charge lands on the other. From our side of time, an eternal now and real engagement look mutually exclusive; from God's side, a responsive God who changes looks like a magnified creature.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism holds what theistic personalism and classical theism each see. God's frame differs in kind from ours, so He holds His own frame and ours together, and each claim is true in its own frame.

What is theistic personalism?

Theistic personalism is, in the wording of the standard reference, "a family of views in the philosophy of religion that construe God as a personal agent," where divine personhood is understood "in a univocal or near-univocal ontological sense with that of finite persons." Its central mark is the rejection of divine simplicity. The label was popularised by the British philosopher Brian Davies, a classical theist, so it began as a critic's description.

The family is wide. Richard Swinburne defines God as a person without a body and builds the attributes outward from that definition. Alvin Plantinga's Does God Have a Nature? argued that simplicity cannot be squared with a personal God. William Lane Craig holds that God is timeless without creation and temporal since creation. R. T. Mullins argues that the timeless God should be retired altogether. Open theism, in Clark Pinnock, Gregory Boyd, John Sanders and William Hasker, gives up exhaustive foreknowledge, and process theism, as a school, stands at the far edge. Not every thinker it covers would choose the label.

Two neighbouring labels cover much of the same ground. Neoclassical theism, as J. Steve Lee puts it in a 2025 review of Mullins's Eternal in Love, "also acknowledges the traditional attributes but denies one or more" of the strict ones: timelessness, strong immutability, impassibility, simplicity. Lee places Mullins "squarely in the neoclassical camp." Theistic mutualism is James Dolezal's coinage in All That Is in God (2017) for views on which God enters "a genuine give-and-take relationship with creation," a category that, as one review notes, runs from process theism to open theism.

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Whether God is a person at all is its own question, argued under divine personhood. Here the subject is the whole package: time, change, relation and feeling. What unites the theistic personalist family is a single conviction. God must be like us in some real respect in order to be with us.

Volume Four, Resolving Immutability and Interaction, takes on Plantinga, Craig, Mullins and the open theists by name.

What does classical theism hold, and why?

Classical theism holds a package of attributes that stand or fall together. Divine simplicity is the claim that God has no parts of any kind, physical or metaphysical, so that His essence and His existence are one. Aseity is His dependence on nothing outside Himself. Eternity is life without succession, possessed whole. Immutability is the impossibility of change, and impassibility the impossibility of being acted upon from outside. Each is a distinct claim, and each is treated in its own place, under divine simplicity and aseity among the attributes of God.

The pedigree is long. Augustine placed time inside the created order and confessed God "in the sublimity of an eternity which is always in the present" (Confessions XI.xiii.16, as quoted in the Stanford Encyclopedia). Boethius gave the definition the medieval West inherited: eternity is "the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life" (V. E. Watts's translation). Aquinas tied the attributes into one system around God as pure act, without unrealised potential, and noted that "the idea of eternity follows immutability, as the idea of time follows movement". His Thomist heirs have defended the system ever since.

The first reason for the package is perfection. Whatever is composed depends on its parts and on whatever unites them, and the God who depends on nothing cannot be assembled. Whatever changes either gains what it lacked or loses what it had, so a changing God was once less or will be less than He is. A God strung along a timeline must wait for His own future. Boethius saw that a merely everlasting God would be the most durable item in the inventory of changing things, and not the Creator of the inventory.

The second reason is sovereignty, and with it the promises. The LORD says through Isaiah:

"I make known the end from the beginning, from ancient times, what is still to come. I say: My purpose will stand, and I will do all that I please." (Isaiah 46:10, NIV 1984)

A God who declares the end from the beginning holds the end now, not as a forecast. Malachi grounds the covenant's survival in the same constancy: "I the LORD do not change. So you, O descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed" (Malachi 3:6). Read in context, the verse speaks of covenant faithfulness first, and classical theism takes up its premise, changelessness affirmed of God in the strongest terms, as the root of His sovereignty.

The tradition also gave an answer to the relational worry. Aquinas taught that "creatures are really related to God Himself; whereas in God there is no real relation to creatures", as "a column is on the right of an animal, without change in itself, but by change in the animal." When the world begins, creation gains everything and God loses nothing.

Volume Three, Resolving Time and Eternity, works through the classical case for eternity in full.

Why does theistic personalism seem required?

Theistic personalism begins where most believers begin: with the God of the narrative. "The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain" (Genesis 6:6). After Moses intercedes for Israel, "the LORD relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened" (Exodus 32:14). James promises an exchange with two live parties: "Come near to God and he will come near to you" (James 4:8). The personalist reads these as reports and declines to let a metaphysic overrule the text.

William Lane Craig gives the case its philosophical form. In his essay "Timelessness and Omnitemporality" he states the argument from God's real relation to the world in four lines:

1. God is creatively active in the temporal world.
2. If God is creatively active in the temporal world, God is really related to the temporal world.
3. If God is really related to the temporal world, God is temporal.
4. Therefore, God is temporal.

The force lies in the middle steps. Even if creating involves no intrinsic change in God, Craig argues, it brings Him into a new relation with a world that did not exist before, and that extrinsic change places Him in time. He concludes that "the best understanding of eternity and time is that God is timeless sans creation and temporal since creation," and adds that the argument does not show God to be essentially temporal.

The second argument concerns knowledge. A being who knew only the tenseless catalogue of dates, Craig writes, "would still be completely in the dark about tensed facts," with no idea of what is happening now. And a being who does know tensed facts "cannot be timeless, for his knowledge must be in constant flux" as those facts change. To know that it is now Tuesday seems to require being somewhere on the timeline. If God is omniscient, He knows what time it is, and so He is in time.

Mullins presses harder. In The End of the Timeless God (Oxford, 2016) he sets rules for the debate: a Christian research program may not retreat into mystery, or reclassify its language as non-literal, at exactly the point where its claims contradict each other. He argues that timelessness, immutability, impassibility and simplicity form one package, so that a decisive strike against any one brings down the rest. And he presses the Incarnation: the Word became flesh, and becoming is what timeless immutability forbids.

Open theism adds the pastoral edge. If the whole future is settled, the theistic personalist asks, what does prayer change? Better a smaller doctrine of foreknowledge than a Bible reinterpreted on every page, and so the open theist holds that God knows the future partly as possibility. Beneath these arguments lies a simple intuition about persons: a lover who cannot be moved does not seem to love.

Volume One, the start of the series, is free to download.

Classical theism vs theistic personalism: the personalist's charges

The first charge is the eternal now. Boethius described eternity as a present that does not pass, and Aquinas reports his phrase: "The now that stands still makes eternity." If God knows all things in one eternal present, the nunc stans, how does He also engage with us in time, answer this prayer on this night, send this prophet to this king? From where we stand, the two descriptions look mutually exclusive. A God who holds all of history at once seems unable to meet it as it comes, and a God who meets it as it comes seems unable to hold it at once. This is a good point, and an appeal to mystery does not answer it.

The second charge is that simplicity turns God into a property. If God does not have His wisdom but is His wisdom, and is likewise His power and His goodness, then God seems identical with a property, and properties are abstract objects that know nothing and do nothing. Plantinga pressed this charge, and it is examined at length in our article on divine simplicity. Its weight here is that a doctrine meant to exalt God appears to have emptied Him.

The third charge concerns real relation and prayer. Aquinas's column is on the right of the animal without any change in the column. Applied to God, the image sounds like a God who is not really in the relationship at all, and Craig judges the classical attempts to deny God's real relation to the world less plausible than the premises of his own argument. If nothing we do makes a difference in God, prayer looks like theatre. The question of whether God changes His mind is the same charge in its most familiar form.

The fourth charge concerns emotion. If God cannot be acted upon, then the grief of Genesis 6 is a figure of speech, the compassion of Hosea is a manner of speaking, and the believer who prays to a God who feels is praying past the God of the Bible. Many have concluded from this that impassibility must go, and the case for and against impassibility is laid out under divine emotions.

The answer to each charge is worked out in Volume Four.

What does classical theism charge against theistic personalism?

The first charge is composition and dependence. A life stretched across earlier and later states is a life with temporal parts, and a being with parts is in that respect divisible. A God who receives from creatures depends on them for what He receives. Aseity goes first, and the rest of the package follows it, which is why the classical theist reads every theistic personalist revision as a revision of God's independence.

The second charge is that change cuts both ways. A God enriched by the world was poorer without it, and a God diminished by the world is poorer now. A God who grows with history cannot hold history whole, and then His promises become forecasts. The believer in a dark season needs to know whether the promises are settled or merely well managed.

The third charge is aimed at Craig's hybrid. A God who passes from timelessness to temporality undergoes the largest change conceivable, and the passage itself is hard to state, since a timeless state has no "before" from which time could be entered. A model built to keep God's essence changeless requires, at its first moment, the greatest change of all.

The fourth charge is the idolatry of the creaturely mode. Begin from what a person is like, remove the limits one at a time, and the result is a very great person: still a member of a kind, still someone whose existence needs an explanation. Dolezal's worry about theistic mutualism is this worry. The God of give-and-take is pictured in the creature's image, a magnified creature rather than the ground on which every creature stands.

The fifth charge answers the claim that classical theism is Greek philosophy imported into the church. That claim, the Hellenization thesis, was long a common account of the early church. Paul Gavrilyuk's The Suffering of the Impassible God (Oxford, 2004) challenged what he calls "the theory of theology's fall into Hellenistic philosophy," and argued that the fathers used impassibility to exclude emotions unworthy of God rather than to strip Him of every affection. His reading has persuaded many historians. The doctrine's deepest warrant was never Athens but Scripture.

The full Many Beings series is listed on the books page.

Two frames: why do both sides see what they see?

The theistic personalist interprets God from our finite, human frame. From inside time, relation means mutual becoming, knowledge of the present means occupying the present, and feeling means being moved. The classical theist views the question from God's own frame. From there, being means possessing the whole of one's life at once, and change of any kind means lack. Each report is accurate about the frame it was made from, and each goes wrong only when it is applied to the other frame without adjustment.

Resolving Time and Eternity states the modern temptation directly:

"One major reason the modern period has preferred a temporal God is relational: it appears logically impossible for God to enter into genuine relationship with His creatures while remaining unrelated to time in any way, and so His eternality is quietly traded away to secure the relationship. Our approach refuses that trade. It offers a way for God to retain the great-making perfection of eternality in its truest form while still relating in a genuine capacity to His creation and His creatures."

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single formal error, and its full statement sits on this site. Theistic personalism, Craig's hybrid temporalism and unindexed classical theism all share one premise: that "time," "change," "relation" and "feeling" must mean one thing for God and for us. FICT denies that premise. A being's nature determines its frame, the mode in which it exists, knows and acts, so a term whose content involves time, change, agency or feeling carries the mode of the being it is said of. Predicating such a term univocally across a difference in kind is the Many Beings Fallacy.

If God's frame differs in kind from ours, He can hold His own perceptual frame and ours at the same time: the whole of history possessed in one act, and every moment of it met as it comes. Neither description has to be traded for the other.

Volume One is free, and the shortest way into the argument.

How does Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answer each charge?

Take the eternal now first. God's act is one and eternal, and the creature receives it as a sequence, because a finite receiver can take in an infinite act only a little at a time. The sequence belongs to the receiving frame.

Craig himself notes that the defender of timelessness could escape his arguments by adopting a tenseless theory of time, which he calls "a very unpalatable route of escape." FICT does not make the tenseless view universal, and it does not move God into time with Craig's hybrid or open theism. It assigns the tenseless whole to God's frame and the passage of time to ours, and both are real. God timelessly knows the complete tensed content of every moment, including its presentness to the one who stands in it; what our passage changes is where we stand, never what He knows.

Plantinga's charge requires God to fill one of two slots, a thing that has properties or a property that things have. Both slots were cut for composite creatures. God is neither, and the conclusion inverts the truth: as Resolving Immutability and Interaction puts it, an abstract object is causally inert, but "pure act is maximal causal vitality." God is not less than personal; He is "personal without residue."

The relation is real from both sides. For the creature, a genuine relationship is an unfolding communion. For God, it is the whole communion possessed at once. Demand mutual becoming and the relationship becomes unreal for God, who would then receive in installments a friendship He once held entire. Demand static completeness of the creature and it becomes unreal for us. Each party must relate in its own mode, which makes the relationship, in Volume Four's words, "one hundred percent real" for each. Our free acts fix the content God eternally knows: had we prayed otherwise, the eternally known story would have been a different story, which is how providence includes answered prayer.

God's affections are real, and they are affections, not passions. Hosea's oracle sets the most human portrait of divine feeling beside the strongest statement that God is not human:

"How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I treat you like Admah? How can I make you like Zeboiim? My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused. I will not carry out my fierce anger, nor will I turn and devastate Ephraim. For I am God, and not man, the Holy One among you. I will not come in wrath." (Hosea 11:8-9, NIV 1984)

The compassion holds because the One who feels it is not a creature. His love, His holy opposition to evil and His compassion are held whole in one act, and we meet them in sequence as that act meets our changing states. What is removed from God, in Volume Four's phrase, is "not warmth but weather."

Mullins's contradictions are real contradictions, against classical theism stated in a single, unindexed frame. Volume Four's verdict is that "the fallacy, not the doctrine, is the disposable part." Craig deserves the same charity. His God keeps a changeless core and a relational life that runs in sequence with the world, which is the right two-tier architecture "held without its index." Supply the index and his own position completes itself, without the price he paid in timelessness and simplicity.

FICT pays its own price, as Craig's hybrid and unindexed classical theism pay theirs. It cannot describe God's frame from the inside. The index marks a difference in kind and does not tell us what that difference is like from within. And it owes a ground for the index, which the series supplies from its axioms about natures rather than by assertion.

Volume Four, Resolving Immutability and Interaction, sets out each answer at full length.

Does this protect our freedom and our relationship with God?

It does, and the mechanism is the direction of knowing. God's knowledge of a free act is grounded in the act, not the act in the knowledge. Volume Four uses the image of a perfectly calibrated thermometer: it cannot read wrongly, yet the heat causes the reading and never the reverse. The image is said analogically, because nothing in God is produced by a creature, but its point holds.

Two directions of grounding run here and must not be confused. Downward, God holds in being that anything is, our freedom included. Upward, the free creature settles which way its acts go, and God's knowledge tracks that settling without being caused by it. Certainty about a choice never forces the choice, which is why theological fatalism dissolves and libertarian free will stands.

The relationship is protected for the same reason. "Come near to God and he will come near to you" describes a real approach on our side and a real meeting on His, each in its own mode. The prodigal's father was already watching the road. The embrace is no less real for having been certain.

The free-will half of the argument is set out in full in Volume One, Resolving the Free Will Dilemma.

Volume One costs nothing. The free download is on this site.

The positions compared

Each position answers the same four questions about God and time, change, feeling and relation, and each protects something real.

Frequently asked questions

What is theistic personalism in simple terms?

Theistic personalism is the view that God is a person in nearly the same sense that we are persons, only without our limits. Because personal life as we know it involves time, change and response, theistic personalists usually hold that God is in time, changes in relation to His creatures, and is not simple. Swinburne, Plantinga, Craig and Mullins are commonly grouped under the label, though they differ widely on how far the revision should go.

Who coined the term theistic personalism?

The term, in its current sense, was popularised by the British philosopher Brian Davies, a classical theist who set it against his own position, so the label began as a critic's description. Those it names did not choose it, and several would describe their own views differently.

Is William Lane Craig a theistic personalist?

He is commonly grouped there by classical theists. Craig holds that God is timeless without creation and temporal since creation, and that God's real relation to a temporal world places Him in time. Volume Four reads him as keeping a changeless divine core while setting aside strict simplicity and strong immutability, which makes him a classically minded member of the family.

What is the difference between neoclassical theism and theistic mutualism?

Neoclassical theism names a position that keeps the traditional attributes and denies one or more of the strict ones, such as timelessness or impassibility. Theistic mutualism is James Dolezal's critical term for every view on which God and creatures enter a give-and-take relationship, in forms that run from process theism to open theism. The first label sorts positions by which attributes they revise; the second sorts them by whether creatures affect God.

Is classical theism just Greek philosophy?

No. The Hellenization thesis held that impassibility and timelessness entered theology from Greek philosophy, but Paul Gavrilyuk's study of the fathers argued that they used impassibility to exclude unworthy emotions rather than to strip God of every affection. The doctrine's warrant lies in Scripture's witness to a God who does not change and who declares the end from the beginning.

Where to go from here

For decades the two camps have been describing the same God from two vantage points, each accurately, and each has mistaken its vantage point for the whole. The theistic personalist has been reporting what God is like to meet; the classical theist has been reporting what God is like to be. Neither report needs to be withdrawn. The wider map is drawn in the attributes of God, the doctrine as a whole in doctrine of God, and the hardest case, the cross, in does God suffer. The argument begins in Volume One, and it is free to download.