Explore 7 questions and answers about Divine Immutability, answered by Dr. Robert Sungenis.
I hold what the Church holds: God is immutable and impassible. He does not change and he does not suffer. I take that as a starting point, not as something to be argued down, and anyone who has heard I say otherwise has heard wrong.
What I dispute is the set of conclusions people draw from those two words, which go well past anything the Church actually defined. Scripture says plainly that God relented over Nineveh, that he was grieved, that he was angry. The usual move is to call every one of those an anthropomorphism, a figure of speech accommodated to our weakness, and to leave it there. Do that consistently and you have a God who cannot be spoken about truthfully in the language Scripture itself uses, which is a strange result to arrive at while defending Scripture.
My argument is that immutability and impassibility were never intended to teach that God cannot change his mind or cannot show emotion. They teach that his nature, his essence, does not alter and that nothing external acts upon him to cause him suffering. Those are different claims, and collapsing them is what produces the difficulty. The book works through James 1:17 and the phrase no variation, through the Church's dogmatic declarations themselves, through the relation of God's anger to the atonement, and through the Fathers.
The questions below take the individual cases: the passages where God is said to relent, what the councils actually defined, and how his anger and his mercy are both real without either one changing what he is.