Introduction
The doctrine of God has a long theological history. From the Church Fathers through the Middle Ages and from the Reformation into modernity, each period, in its own way, contributes to the conversation. The pressing problem centers specifically around the extent of the doctrine of God’s immutability. If God is wholly immutable, then God’s relationality is at risk, where a non-reciprocal, static God is unable to communicate effectively with His creation. If God is wholly mutable, then God’s goodness is at risk, where humanity finds itself serving an unreliable, capricious God. It is the extent of God’s immutability that defines the problem that Isaak Dorner attempts to solve in the modern era. The answer to the question of the extent of God’s immutability has valuable soteriological implications. If God is completely immutable and all change falls on the side of the world, then the necessity of faith and the Incarnation come into question; whereas if God is completely mutable, it raises the question of God’s absolute perfection. Dorner’s essay, Divine Immutability, provides an alternative to classical theism’s view of immutability that overcomes the modern initiatives of deism and pantheism by asserting God’s living immutability. The research begins by providing a backdrop to Dorner’s essay, which highlights the alternative perspectives that Dorner refutes. Next, an analysis of the modern influences upon Dorner ensues, which assists in understanding the development of Dorner’s doctrine, followed by an exploration of Dorner’s solution of living immutability.
The Occasion
During the nineteenth century, several views of God’s immutability circulated that provided the occasion for Isaak Dorner’s essay. The classical view of God’s immutability espoused the doctrine of divine simplicity. The Kenotics also contributed to the conversation by suggesting a deactualization of Christ. Finally, deism and pantheism also provided alternatives to the classical view of immutability by completely separating or completely subsuming God and the world. Dorner counters each view on his way to developing his own doctrine of God’s immutability.
Classical Theism
Classical theism took God’s immutability seriously by suggesting that the self-sufficiency of God excluded any change. The suppression of God’s changeability rested on a soteriological emphasis. From a classical perspective, salvation depended on God’s perfect power and goodness. Any change in a perfect God meant a change for the worse, thus risking the efficacy of salvation.
Divine Immutability: A Critical Reconsideration (Fortress Texts in Modern Theology)
Classical theism’s view of immutability was directly related to the concept of God’s divine simplicity. Divine simplicity has two related aspects, which are critical to understanding Dorner’s initiative. First, according to Katherin Rogers, the doctrine of divine simplicity asserts that God is identical with His attributes, and thus, by definition, His attributes are identical with each other.[1] For example, God is immutability, omnipotence, and love, and immutability, omnipotence, and love are the same. Dorner expands the explanation by stating that, according to divine simplicity, God has “no distinction of substance and accident.”[2] Mutability can only occur in creatures whose identity and attributes are separate. An identified student can have an attribute of knowledge, and that knowledge can increase or decrease, thus a change occurs. However, if God’s identity is His attributes, then any change in God’s perfect attributes would make God less than perfect; therefore, according to divine simplicity, there can be no contingent properties in God. God’s immutability is absolute.
Once God’s attributes are identically aligned with His essence and each other, the second aspect of the doctrine of divine simplicity, actus purus, naturally follows. Finite creatures have both potentiality and actuality. As Rogers explains, “the good for anything is the actualization of its potentials.”[3] Simply stated, an apple tree has the potential to produce good apples in actuality. However, the perfect good, by definition, cannot actualize potential because it is already perfectly actualized; it is pure actualization, actus purus. In sum, since God’s essence is identical with His attributes, God is already perfectly actualized. As a result, Dorner explains that the traditional view claims that God’s “knowing is therefore also willing, as his willing is knowing, for both are objectively one; they are both God’s essence, which would become mutable through a separation of the knowing and willing.”[4] It is the lack of any real distinctions between God and His attributes and between potentiality and actuality, which eliminates the possibility of mutability, that Dorner challenges.
Dorner does not oppose the concept of immutability on its face; he opposes an unbalanced view resulting from the classical doctrine of divine simplicity. According to Dorner, the lop-sided development of God’s immutability places the doctrines of Christ and creation at risk. First, Piotr Malysz explains that if God is absolute immutability, then, for Dorner, God can be defined apart from Christ’s involvement in the world, and the death and suffering of a divine Christ has no impact on God.[5] Second, absolute immutability undermines God’s relationship with His creation. If God is viewed through the doctrine of divine simplicity, then faith is undermined by ascribing change completely to humanity in a world where a transcendent God produces the same static results.[6] Robert Williams summarizes Dorner’s critique of classical theism’s doctrine of God by using a monarchial metaphor; whereby God is a like a transcendent king ruling His kingdom through a non-reciprocal, non-relational, master-slave relationship of power.[7]
Kenosis
Classical theism emphasized God’s immutability over God’s personal involvement with humanity, but it was the mutually exclusive arrangement between the concepts of immutability and involvement that Dorner targeted. During the middle of the nineteenth century, the Kenotics stressed personal involvement over and above God’s immutability by reformulating the traditional understanding of Christology. Thus, Dorner faced an error in the opposite direction from classical theism. According to Williams, although the Kenotics lacked cohesiveness, in general, the movement attempted to reconcile divine attributes with human nature or true humanity with immutability.[8] The solution came at the cost of emptying Christ of His divinity, at least in part, during His Incarnation.
Gottfried Thomasius provided the most refined version of the kenotic theories. Against the liberal tendencies that denied Christ’s divinity, Thomasius provided a Christology that explained Christ’s two natures by positing that Christ “gave himself over into the form of human limitation … without on that account ceasing to be God.”[9] According to Williams, Thomasius accomplished the task by making a distinction between the immanent divine attributes, which refer to God, and the relative divine attributes, which only refer to God’s relation to the world but not to God Himself.[10] The immanent attributes such as freedom and love continue to exist during Christ’s earthly life, but the relative attributes such as omnipotence and omniscience cease to exist, at least temporarily, and become potentiality rather than actuality.
Dorner provides a sustained critique against the Kenotics in part one of his essay. First, Dorner denies the distinction between immanent and relative attributes. Per Dorner, Thomasius’s idea that relative attributes, such as omniscience, do not pertain to God, but only to God’s relation to the world, is incoherent. In reply to Thomasius, Dorner states, “omniscience does not permit him to stop halfway, for it is knowledge also of God and the world,” and if Christ relinquishes the knowledge of God, “then it would not be a merely relative but an inner-divine attribute that is surrendered.”[11] Second, according to Williams, Dorner believes that Thomasius’s deactualization of Christ is a form of Arianism, which undermines soteriology.[12] In sum, Dorner resists both classical theism’s over-actualized emphasis on God’s immutability and the Kenotics deactualized limits on God’s immutability.
Deism and Pantheism
Against a balanced view of immutability, Dorner identifies two other potential options: deism and pantheism, which Dorner believes are the inevitable result of classical theism’s actus purus. Granted, it seems odd to accuse classical theism of legitimizing pantheism, but Dorner utilizes an argument from logic to prove his point. Dorner first recognizes that reality consists of contingency and change, and then he asserts that classical theism completely excludes the world’s reality from God. Finally, he claims that theology will ultimately need to somehow ground reality in God. Accordingly, for Dorner, the inevitable consequence of “the absolute exclusion of plurality, process, and changeableness from God leads to acosmism.”[13] The acosmism that Dorner is referring to is a “different form of pantheism” where theologians “submerge … the actual world in God.”[14]
Ironically, Dorner asserts that if God’s absolute immutability does not result in acosmism, then it will lead to deism and ultimately to atheism. If God is transcendently immutable in relation to the world, and all change rests on the world, then, for Dorner, classical theism is essentially a deistic doctrine. The natural consequence of deism is an unnecessary redundancy where God becomes irrelevant, and thus, it leads to atheism. At this point Dorner takes the concept to its logical conclusion, which undermines Christ’s divinity. If God is completely excluded from the contingency and changeability of the world, then Christ’s arrival requires no divine intervention; thus “Christ would be merely a quantitative increase in humanity.”[15] Furthermore, divine intervention would be impossible; thus a “rebirth would be conceived in Pelagian fashion as the work of freedom.”[16] Dorner assumes that a wholly immutable, deistic God not only undermines Christ’s divinity, but also destroys soteriology by placing it completely on the work of humanity. Accordingly, Dorner rejects any form of pantheism that undermines God’s immutability, and rejects any form of deism that undermines God’s livingness in relation to His creation. Instead, Dorner turns to his contemporaries to begin formulating a doctrine of God that acknowledges both the immutability and vitality of God.
The Influences
Dorner was an erudite scholar of theological history and confidently borrowed from the philosophical ideas of his contemporaries. Schelling, Hegel, and Schleiermacher had a lasting impact on Dorner and the development of his doctrine of immutability. Schelling’s dynamic immutability, Hegel’s liberated God as Substance and Subject, and Schleiermacher’s primacy of love find significance in Dorner’s doctrine of immutability.
Schelling
Classical theism’s doctrine of divine simplicity denied distinctions between God and His attributes. Changeability was impossible because no distinction exists between potentiality and actuality. Schelling’s organic, as opposed to logical or ethical, understanding of God’s immutability provided Dorner a method of separation between God’s potentiality and actuality. Robert Brown explains that Schelling’s bipolar God consists of both a triad of powers that underlay all reality and a freedom that encompasses God’s will.[17] The three powers include God’s inward character, outward giving of self, and a unity of the inner and outer.[18] However, for Schelling, the triadic powers require God’s freedom of the will to restrain or stabilize them; otherwise, the powers would result in chaos. In sum, Schelling’s God consists of three stabilized powers working in a dynamic process of actualization, a dynamic immutability. For Schelling, God is immutable because He is a self-sufficient entity who freely wills and creates without requiring the existence of the world. Schelling’s God is also mutable in the sense that a complex dynamic process exists within God, as opposed to a divinely simple, unrelatable God. Schelling’s dynamic immutability allowed Dorner to begin envisioning both an immutable and mutable God.
Reflecting on the tension of Schelling’s dynamic immutability, Dorner concludes, “God is to be conceived as eternally both absolute potentiality and absolute actualization by virtue of the eternally self-rejuvenating divine life-process,” by which “God eternally wills and confirms its own ground.”[19] Unfortunately for Dorner, Schelling’s freedom inherent in God’s will leaves open the possibility that God is capable of evil. Brown explains that, for Dorner, Schelling’s doctrine of God “has the unacceptable implication that God is capable of choosing to act in a manner that is not good, even though he does not actually do so.”[20] Although Dorner finds value in Schelling’s dynamic immutability, he ultimately clarifies the distinction between God’s immutability and mutability, and limits God’s potential capriciousness by engaging the philosophy of Hegel.
Hegel
Hegel’s philosophy has broad ranging implications for theologians. Malysz provides several Hegelian concepts that influenced Dorner’s formulation of his doctrine of divine immutability. First, Hegel’s trinitarian emphasis reflects his concept of unarbitrariness, which envisions “a subject and a unity of subject-constitutive distinctions,” whereby God always remains the same even in the “concretization of his distinctions.”[21] Hegel’s view of the trinity represents the essence of God and the reality of God’s complexity or distinctiveness – substance and subject.
Dorner extrapolates Hegel’s trinitarian perspective into God’s involvement in the world. God’s vitality or livingness is realized through the Second Person of the Trinity, who joins God “with the world … [so that] this new actuality is also something new for God’s knowledge of himself and of the world.”[22] In other words, Dorner applies Hegelian philosophy to the Incarnation to explain how God can be self-same and changeable. To do this, Dorner removes the doctrine of immutability from ontology and centers it on Hegel’s trinitarian reality. The relocation assists Dorner in formulating a separation between substance and subject, between immutability and mutability or, in Dorner’s vernacular, between essence and freedom, as represented by the Father and by the Son, respectively.
Hegel’s concepts of freedom and necessity also find their way into Dorner’s understanding of God’s immutability. According to Malysz, Hegel’s self-determining God is “both unnecessary and can either be dismissed altogether, or simply equated with the process of the world.”[23] In either case, God is completely free; He is free from the necessity to exist as a substance, and free to self-determinately act and move as the subject, even to the point of making Himself finite in Christ. According to Malysz, Hegel defines freedom as being “for oneself precisely as oneself – to realize oneself.”[24] Thus, to be free, God must not only be free from the external world, but must also be free to align with His self-determined inner necessity represented in the Trinity. Thus, the concepts of inner necessity and freedom remain inseparable.
According to Malysz, by utilizing Hegelian philosophy, Dorner identifies God as Father, who wills the Son as the representative of God’s freedom, not just to be, but “freedom to be and to act.’[25] Regarding God’s freedom to be, the inner necessity of God freely manifests itself relationally within the persons of the Trinity. God’s inner necessity provides Dorner the limitation of God’s will required to restrict Schelling’s dynamic immutability, which allowed for God’s capriciousness. Regarding the freedom to act, Dorner asserts that God’s vitality in the world is revealed in the Incarnation by stating, “so far as he dwells in man, [God] also leads a historical life in the world, enters into contact with time.”[26]
Finally, the Hegelian concept of becoming finds its reflection in Dorner’s doctrine of divine immutability. According to Malysz, the presence of Hegel’s God is actualized through the life of Christ, thus the presence of God “shows itself closer to the world than the world is to itself.”[27] Hegel’s panentheism is evident as he asserts that the becoming of the presence of God is also the becoming of the world. According to Williams, Hegel’s becoming is not only actualized through Christ’s life, but also Christ’s death, which is the self-definition of God as love, a love that must encompass both being (God’s substance) and God’s nonbeing (God’s subjectivity or movement).[28] Thus, for Hegel, becoming and love are the same reality because Christ’s death is the “vison of this love itself – not [love merely] for or on behalf of others, but precisely divinity in this universal identity.”[29]
Hegel’s concept of becoming reveals itself in Dorner’s doctrine of divine immutability in two ways. First, Hegel’s emphasis on Christ’s actualization of God’s essence provides the impetus for Dorner’s extension of God’s freedom to the world. Second, Hegel’s emphasis on God’s identity as love provides the foundation for Dorner’s future understanding of God’s ethical essence. However, against Hegel, Dorner states that the world “depends on the fact that God is self-conscious independently of the world.”[30] In other words, Dorner attempts to remove Hegel’s pantheistic tendencies, but he retains the connection between God’s actuality and Christ, between becoming and love. However, Dorner had in mind a love that moved beyond Hegel, a love that took primacy over all other attributes, a love inspired by Schleiermacher.
Schleiermacher
Schleiermacher was Dorner’s most significant conversation partner. In Dorner’s essay, he provides an extended survey of the history of the doctrine of immutability that ends with an analysis of Schleiermacher. In part two of his essay, Dorner spends most of his time criticizing Schleiermacher’s work, but, in the end, finds value in Schleiermacher’s efforts. First, responding to part one of Schleiermacher’s book, Christian Faith, Dorner provides a summary of his critique stating,
Schleiermacher conceives God to be simple self-sameness and self-identical, without opposition. In this simplicity no real distinction between attributes, no distinction between knowledge and will, nor between will and ability are supposed to remain. There is nothing potential in God that does not become eternally actual …. God rather comprehends everything eternally and indivisibly with one and the same immutable thought.[31]
Dorner places Schleiermacher in the camp of classical theism’s doctrine of divine simplicity where no distinctions of divine attributes exist, and God is pure actuality with no potentiality, actus purus. Accordingly, Dorner levels the same accusations toward Schleiermacher as he did toward the doctrine of divine simplicity. Namely, the classical doctrine inevitably leads to deism and then to atheism or Pelagianism, or the doctrine leads to a form of pantheism.
Although Dorner’s analysis focuses primarily on critiquing Schleiermacher, the final paragraph of Dorner’s historical survey concludes by recognizing that Schleiermacher did not completely align with the classical doctrines of immutability. In fact, Dorner suggests that in the second part of Christian Faith, the “entire position is reversed when Schleiermacher speaks of the realm of grace. For here we have … an ‘action of God’ motivated by love.”[32] Dorner recognizes the distinctive nature of God’s attribute of love, but he believes that Schleiermacher is inconsistent by not revising the first part of his book to align with the more developed second part. However, no scholarly consensus exists. Robert Sherman assumes Dorner mistakenly missed the developmental connection between the first and second part of Schleiermacher’s work, while Matthias Gockel and Williams maintain that Dorner was correct, and Schleiermacher’s work consisted of conflicting accounts of God’s immutability.[33] Regardless, Schleiermacher’s distinction regarding the concept of love had a profound influence upon the development of Dorner’s doctrine of divine immutability.
Schleiermacher asserts a primacy of God’s love distinct from God’s other attributes. The traditional view of immutability asserts that God has no distinction between His essence and attributes, but Schleiermacher’s exception occurs because “love is being equated with the being or nature of God,” and “only love and no other divine attribute can be equated with God in this fashion.”[34] Schleiermacher’s distinctive nature of love provides the breakthrough that Dorner needs to ground God’s immutability in a unity with distinctions. Dorner recognized that the concept of love, as advocated by Schleiermacher, could be the force that drives causality and empowers the livingness of God, while simultaneously manifesting God’s immutable being. Under the influence of Schelling’s dynamic immutability, Hegel’s liberated God as Substance and Subject, and Schleiermacher’s primacy of love, Dorner’s doctrine of divine immutability takes shape.
The Solution
The analysis of Dorner’s solution to the extent of God’s immutability begins by first showing the relationship between God’s immutable ethical essence and God’s mutable ethical freedom. An examination of how God’s love is actualized within multiple modes of existence then ensues. Finally, the question of whether God’s ethical necessity takes priority over ethical freedom is addressed.
Ethical Essence
Dorner’s reconstruction of the classical doctrine of God’s immutability begins where Schleiermacher left off. God is love. God’s essence is love. Love is ethical. Accordingly, God’s love is ethical essence, which is also considered God’s ethical necessity, that which is absolutely immutable. In sum, according to Dorner, “The ethical in God is God in his divinity.”[35] Unlike classical theism’s approach to immutability where God is identical with His attributes, and His attributes are identical with each other, Dorner contends that God is identical with love, and love is not identical with God’s other attributes.
Love takes a form of primacy over the other attributes. Dorner asserts that God’s physical and logical attributes “do not exist for their own sake … they exist for absolute love.”[36] For example, omnipotence reports to love, and love directs omnipotence. Accordingly, Dorner contends that God is not “immutable in his knowing and willing of the world and in his decree. On the contrary, in all these respects there takes place also on his side change, alteration, a permitting of himself to be determined.”[37] Since God’s knowing and willing are directed by love, God’s knowledge and power are mutable. Dorner’s doctrine leaves room for God’s livingness, but the changeability of God is permitted only if “one thing continues to be preserved, the ethical self-identity [love] and immutability of God. This must remain inviolate.”[38]
Dorner’s synthesis of immutability and mutability requires a freedom that envelops both. First, God’s immutability as ethical essence requires a freedom independent from the world; otherwise Dorner lands in Hegelian panentheism. Second, God’s mutability requires ethical freedom, a freedom for God to act; otherwise, Dorner risks deism. Dorner connects the interdependent reality of God’s ethical essence and ethical freedom by stating,
The ethical immutability that is in God requires also for itself the livingness that is just as eternal; the ethically necessary points of itself to freedom as its means of actualization. The livingness of God, the principle of which lies in his freedom, is no less bound up with the ethically necessary through itself, through its inner essence; the free is for the ethically necessary.[39]
In short, the mutability of God is ethically free to move, change, and act, which actualizes God’s immutable ethical essence. In sum, Dorner demands both an immutable ethical essence that avoids pantheistic tendencies, and a mutability that avoids deistic tendencies.
The ramifications for humanity are palpable. Since God’s ethical freedom allows for the mutability of omnipotent power, God has the capacity to limit His power and allow humans to resist God. For Dorner, the ability for humans to freely resist God is absolutely necessary because a love “for God which was not freely offered but was only impelled by an utterly irresistible determination would have little worth (if indeed it could be called true love).”[40] Dorner contends that God’s ethically free mutability provides the necessary environment for the actualization of God’s immutable essence, love: an environment that unlimited power could never produce.
The concept of ethically free love leads Dorner to conclude that “love between God and man must be a reciprocal relation, as this is required by the nature of love.”[41] If the relationship between God and man is reciprocal, then Williams explains that, for Dorner, God’s knowledge must also be contingent on reciprocity.[42] Similar to the limitation of God’s mutable power, God’s knowledge is ethically free, thus also self-limiting because it is directed by love. Accordingly, for Dorner, God has knowledge of all possibilities, but “the knowledge of the actuality for which freedom will decide comes to him from the world of free beings.”[43] In sum, the immutable essence of God is love, but the ethical expression of love requires reciprocity, a reciprocity made available by God’s mutable power and knowledge, which expresses His living relationship with His creation.
Modes of Being
God’s ethical essence and ethical freedom also have soteriological implications. If God is only ethical essence, the world could not receive Him. However, if God is only ethical freedom, then God is finite and lacks salvific power. The question remains as to exactly how God continues as an immutable, ethical essence, while simultaneously actualizing His essence in an environment of mutable freedom to redeem humanity. Dorner attempts to answer the question by diving deep into Plato’s question, “whether the good is good because God wills it, or whether God wills it because it is good.”[44] Duns Scotus’s voluntarism affirms the first statement, the good is good because God wills it. The problem with Scotus’s response is that the good is not caused by the essence of God, but instead, the good relies on God’s power to decide good or evil, as if both were equally viable alternatives. Aquinas’s intellectualism affirms the second statement, God wills it because it is good. The problem with Aquinas’s response is that the good and God are independent from one another, which implies that the good controls God. Dorner rejects both answers because each in their own way separate God from goodness.
Against intellectualism and voluntarism, Dorner provides a third alternative. Instead of separating God from goodness, Dorner asserts that the good is in God, which shifts the conversation from ontology to coinherent ethics. For Dorner, divine will remains efficacious, but “the ethical cannot have its reality in God simply through divine will; rather the ethical must be an eternal reality in God’s being and essence.”[45] Once again, Dorner works toward an interdependent reality that synthesizes immutability and mutability to solve the apparent contradiction that the good is both intrinsic in God and willed by God. Williams explains that Dorner’s answer to the conundrum is that “the ethical in God has multiple modes of existence that nevertheless inwardly coinhere.”[46]
Reflective of both Schelling’s triadic powers and Hegel’s trinitarian emphasis, Dorner’s ethical substance is the mode correlated with the Father, and ethical freedom is the mode correlated with the Son. More to the point, Williams asserts that the good “requires the mediation of freedom in order to exist … the divine ethical substance is mediated and actualized by freedom.”[47] In other words, the modes of being are inseparable; Christ freely actualizes the Father’s essence to redeem humanity in a perichoretic relationship. However, if Christ actualizes the Father, the question remains as to whether a priority exists between God’s ethical substance (the Father) and ethical freedom (the Son).
Necessity and Freedom
Dorner’s doctrine of immutability requires both ethical essence, also considered ethical necessity, and an ethical freedom that actualizes God’s ethical necessity. Regarding the primacy between the two concepts, it appears Dorner favors ethical necessity, “God is to be conceived first as the ethically necessary being or as the holy, and second as the ethically free; through both of these God actualizes himself eternally as self-conscious, holy, and free love.”[48] In light of Dorner’s formulation, Robert Brown accuses Dorner of landing in the intellectualism that he attempts to resist, since the ethically necessary, the ontological aspect, appears to will the ethically free.[49] However, it appears that Brown fails to grasp the breadth of Dorner’s perspective. The nature of the relationship between ethical necessity and ethical freedom is reciprocal, not causal. In Hegelian language, separation between substance and subject is impossible without undermining both. Accordingly, ethical necessity does not stand alone as a separate entity that wills ethical freedom. Instead, as Williams explains, ethical necessity requires ethical freedom for both to exist, just as the Father requires the Son.[50] In sum, the actualization of God entails a complex reciprocity that avoids subordination, and requires both ethical necessity and ethical freedom.
Ultimately, the ethical essence in God, the mode represented by the Father, and the ethical freedom in God, the mode represented by the Son, come full circle as they unite in love. In Dorner’s words, “the absolute union of the ethically necessary and the ethically free in which the two confirm one another, is love; and thus the primal good is love only because in him the ethical has a threefold and yet indissolubly coherent mode of being.”[51] The threefold mode of being is the reciprocal relationship between God’s ethical necessity, God’s ethical freedom, and God’s being as love, which mediates the relationship. Within this love relationship, God’s immutable love remains forever constant, while God’s mutable relationship with the world varies in accordance with the directives of love. Finally, it is the amalgamation of God’s immutable ethical essence, which undermines pantheism, and God’s mutable ethical freedom, which undermines deism, that effectuates God’s living immutability.
Conclusion
Under the influences of modern philosophy and theology, specifically that of Schelling, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, Dorner provides a doctrine of God comprised of a reciprocal arrangement of God’s ethical essence and ethical freedom – God’s living immutability. Dorner’s solution provides a coherent alternative to the risks associated with the doctrine of divine simplicity inherent within a classical view of God’s immutability. Additionally, Dorner’s work overcomes the modern initiatives of extreme immutability found in deism and of extreme mutability found in various forms of pantheism. These findings affirm an approach to the doctrine of God that allows for both a perfectly stable, loving God, and, simultaneously, a God actualized through the Incarnation necessary for a dynamic faith and an efficacious soteriology. Although Dorner’s doctrine of living immutability has much to offer, further research regarding the potential ramifications of limiting God’s ontological immutability may be beneficial, especially in relationship to the problem of evil, process theology, and modern evangelical thought. Furthermore, additional research regarding the exact nature of Dorner’s limitation of foreknowledge and its relationship to both modern orthodox Christianity, and, alternatively, open theism may be fruitful.
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[1] Katherin Rogers, “The Traditional Doctrine of Divine Simplicity,” Religious Studies 32, no. 2 (1996): 166.
[2] Isaak A. Dorner, Divine Immutability: A Critical Reconsideration, trans. Robert R. Williams and Claude Welch (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 136.
[3] Rogers, “The Traditional Doctrine,” 176.
[4] Dorner, Divine Immutability, 136.
[5] Piotr J. Malysz, “Hegel’s Conception of God and Its Application by Isaak Dorner to the Problem of Divine Immutability,” Pro Ecclesia 15, no. 4 (Fall 2006): 465.
[6] Malysz, “Hegel’s Conception of God,” 465.
[7] Robert R. Williams, “Introduction,” in Divine Immutability: A Critical Reconsideration (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 35.
[8] Ibid., 6.
[9] Gottfried Thomasius, “Christ’s Person and Work,” in God and Incarnation: In Mid-Nineteenth Century German Theology, ed. and trans. Claude Welch (New York: Oxford, 1965), 48.
[10] Williams, “Introduction,” 7.
[11] Isaak A. Dorner, “System of Christian Doctrine,” in God and Incarnation: In Mid-Nineteenth Century German Theology, ed. and trans. Claude Welch (New York: Oxford, 1965), 194.
[12] Williams, “Introduction,” 8.
[13] Dorner, Divine Immutability, 95.
[14] Ibid., 96.
[15] Ibid., 109.
[16] Dorner, Divine Immutability, 109.
[17] Robert F. Brown, “Schelling and Dorner on Divine Immutability,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 53, no. 2 (June 1985): 241.
[18] Brown, “Schelling and Dorner,” 241.
[19] Dorner, Divine Immutability, 137.
[20] Brown, “Schelling and Dorner,” 247.
[21] Malysz, “Hegel’s Conception of God,” 450.
[22] Dorner, Divine Immutability, 188.
[23] Malysz, “Hegel’s Conception of God,” 454.
[24] Ibid., 461.
[25] Ibid., 468.
[26] Dorner, Divine Immutability, 145.
[27] Malysz, “Hegel’s Conception of God,” 458.
[28] Robert R. Williams, Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other (Albany: State University of New York, 1992), 232–33.
[29] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart, vol. 3, The Consummate Religion (Berkeley: University of California, 1998), 125.
[30] Dorner, Divine Immutability, 47. Emphasis added.
[31] Dorner, Divine Immutability, 124.
[32] Ibid., 129.
[33] Robert Sherman, “Isaak August Dorner on Divine Immutability: A Missing Link between Schleiermacher and Barth,” The Journal of Religion 77, no. 3 (July 1997): 387–88. See also Matthias Gockel, “On the Way from Schleiermacher to Barth: A Critical Reappraisal of Isaak August Dorner’s Essay on Divine Immutability,” Scottish Journal of Theology 53, no. 4 (2000): 500-502 and Williams, “Introduction,” 7.
[34] Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, ed. Catherine L. Kelsey and Terrence N. Tice, trans. Terrence N. Tice, Catherine L. Kelsey, and Edwina Lawler (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2016), 2:1007-1008 (§ 167.1).
[35] Dorner, Divine Immutability, 175. Emphasis added.
[36] Ibid., 175–76.
[37] Ibid., 165.
[38] Ibid., 176.
[39] Dorner, Divine Immutability, 159.
[40] Ibid., 147.
[41] Dorner, Divine Immutability, 148.
[42] Williams, “Introduction,” 25.
[43] Dorner, Divine Immutability, 149–50.
[44] Ibid., 167.
[45] Dorner, Divine Immutability, 170. Emphasis added.
[46] Williams, “Introduction,” 29.
[47] Robert R. Williams, “I. A. Dorner: Ethical Immutability of God,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 54, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 732–33.
[48] Dorner, Divine Immutability, 171. Emphasis added.
[49] Brown, “Schelling and Dorner,” 247.
[50] Williams, “Introduction,” 31.
[51] Dorner, Divine Immutability, 174.
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