A Fragment on Scholasticism or a Plea of a Scholastic Believer
The active immutability of God, the ever-living and eternally unchanging interpenetration of the divine persons, translates into the divine willingness, without a shadow of turning, to make us partakers of that gloriously inalterable and living incorruptibility. We are most fortunate that in the incarnation God is not engaged in a work of self-realization but in the redemptive working-out of his eternal glory: incarnation is, in its immutable purpose, God with us and for us. Such doctrine, I would hope, will never be viewed as “subevangelical.” Our piety must not falter before the first paradox, the involvement of immutable God, because on the first rest the second, the transformation of death into life, of corruptibility into incorruptibility.
Richard A. Muller, “Incarnation, Immutability, and the Case for Classical Theism, Westminster Theological Journal, 45 (1983), 40.
Richard Muller is here responding to an essay by Clark Pinnock, “The Need for a Scriptural, and therefore Neo-Classical Theism.” Pinnock’s argument is that the traditional conception of God as immutability, atemporal, and so forth are pagan philosophical imports.
For many Bible-believing Christians there is a ring of truth to Pinnock’s statements. The God of systematic theology can appear a cold and distance deity. He may, especially when the vocabulary is unfamiliar, poorly defined, and not applied to worship seem dead.