If I believe God is relative, how did I come up with the idea, and what makes me so sure of it that I am publicing it as a definitive truth?

The idea never occurred to me before I was fifty-years-old, but it came about as a result of fifty years of church attendance and thirty-some years of Bible reading. It gradually emerged from nearly thirty years of formal study of theology. No teacher or preacher ever suggested the idea, neither intentionally nor directly. It came to me full-blown, plain and clear out of my entire experience with the things of God.
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I am such a logical thinker that most friends and acquaintances assume that logic is my primary mode of thought. I am a logician, but have not always been. I am not by nature a logical person. It is a method of thinking that I learned only in my late thirties. I have since, taught logic in universities for more than thirty years. It is now so imbedded in my mind that it is second nature for me to think logically.

My primary thought, however, comes from my sense of the whole. I am by nature a gestalt thinker. I somehow sense meaning before I understand or can explain. It might seem to be intuitive knowledge, but it comes not from intuition but from observation of the “big picture.”

Ordinarily my perception of the gestalt of a thing is somewhat vague or fuzzy; it is definite without sharp definitions. That first impression generally proves to be correct, but not always. I am keenly aware that I could be wrong, so usually I turn to logic to check it out.

Gestalt: A physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts. From Middle High German: “form, configuration, appearance.”

After half a century of living with God and the things of God, I saw divine relativity as the gestalt of the Bible, not seen in its parts but in the whole. I came to see it first neither in the details of any particular verses of scripture nor in any specific part of the Bible. Rather, it arose in my consciousness as the dominant biblical theme. All else found its meaning only as it contributed to this overall picture.

All of this is, I realize, somewhat vague and subjective. Neither evidence nor proof has been offered. Thus, as is my habit, I turned to logic to see if the idea of a relative God stood up under the careful scrutiny of reason.

In psychology, rationalization is the process of constructing a logical justification for something that was decided on the ground of some mental process other than logic. Ordinarily, rationalization is seen as a logical coverup for flawed beliefs.

In what follows, I have carefully avoided any improper use of reason to rationalize my theological position. I leave it to you to decide whether I am reasoning or rationalizing.

One of the more useful logical forms is called the Reduction ad Absurdum, “a mode of argumentation that seeks to establish a contention by deriving an absurdity from its denial, thus arguing that a thesis must be accepted because its rejection would be untenable.”

In the following, I present numerous theological reductios, to prove that it is absurd to deny the notion that God is relative. The blog is long, so if you get the point early on, you might want to just skip down and see how it is ended.
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If God is immutable, then he cannot change (by definition).
God does change (as I will establish in the next paragraph).
Therefore, God is not immutable.

In 1 Samuel 8, the story is told of Israel’s plea to Samuel to provide them a king, like other nations. When Samuel speaks to God about this, the Lord tells him to listen to the people, but to warn them of what life under a human king would be like. He lets Samuel off the hook, telling him that the people have rejected God as their king, not Samuel as their respected leader.

The people ignore God’s warning about the nature of a kingship, and in chapter 10 the story is told of Saul as God’s choice for their king. See in particular, 10:24.

A reading of the first ten chapters of 1 Samuel makes it apparent that God is their king and has no desire to be replaced. However, in response to the insistence of his covenant people, God has Samuel anoint Saul king over Israel. God changed his plan of action, in response to his people.

Later, in 1 Samuel 13:13-14, the text indicates that Saul and his descendants would have ruled over Israel forever if Saul had been obedient. Since, however, he had not, God rejected whom earlier he had chosen. In chapter 16:12-14, God explicitly takes his Spirit from Saul, his chosen, and an evil spirit now enters Saul.

In this passage, God’s Spirit now comes upon David, God’s new choice. God’s earlier choice failed, so he makes a new choice. In doing so, God has changed his course of action, not his purpose, not his character, only the means of accomplishing that purpose. Nonetheless, in some sense, he changed.

We could have adverted to the story of Noah, Moses, or later, to Solomon, Jonah, or a multitude of other instances. If God is immutable--and this is a cardinal feature of traditional Christian doctrine--then, by definition, he cannot change. He does, in certain definable senses, often change in the course of the biblical story, therefore God is not immutable. Thus, the cardinal doctrine of divine immutability misrepresents the God revealed in the Christian scriptures, and therefore must be rejected.

An interesting question about the supposed divine immutability can be seen in a particular contrast between the Old and New Testaments. In the Old Testament, God is found regularly warring against and defeating the enemies of his people, Israel. In the New Testament, Rome has invaded and now occupies and rules over Israel, but there is no indication that God is going to war against and defeat this Roman enemy (except, perhaps, depending on how you interpret the book of Revelation, he may intend to do this in some future–a future distant from the present).

In the past he has defeated the Egyptian, the Amalekite, the Canaanite, the Midianite, the Philistine, . . . the Syrian, and numerous other enemies of his people. In the present, New Testament, situation, God takes no military initiative against the Roman. In fact, when God-with-Us (Immanuel), Jesus is arrested by the Romans and Peter draws his sword against them, Jesus not only attempts no self-defense, he denounces the use of the sword.

It would appear that in the New Testament, God has changed his modus operandus from using violence as a common way of dealing with his opponents to the use of suffering as a means of transformation.
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If God is omniscient and omnipotent, he knows how to make his people obey.
In Hosea 6:4, God says he doesn’t know what to do.
Therefore, God is not omniscient.

God has richly blessed Israel, he has punished/disciplined them, he has sent prophets to warn them, he has pleaded with them--all efforts to persuade them to obey and thus live out God’s purpose for them. But in Hosea’s time, after much pleading, a frustrated God finally says: “O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee?”

Nothing God has done has worked. He has done all he knows how to do to correct them, to bring about an attitude adjustment, but Israel, for the most part, has ignored him. Now God, seemingly at his wit’s end, doesn’t know what to do.

Many of us have heard such words from our frustrated parents, or perhaps as frustrated parents, spoken them to our children. After teaching them the right, correcting them, punishing them, praising them, taking them into our arms and pleading with them, they have still rebelled. Finally the day came, seems always to come, when the parents throw up their hands and ask, “What is it going to take? Your father and I have done everything we know how.” In desperation the parent often adds, “You tell us. You tell us what it is going to take.”

The supposedly omniscient (all-knowing) God here appears not to know how to change his people. So, later, in Jeremiah and ultimately in Jesus, God lays aside his Plan A and sets forth Plan B, a New Covenant (New Testament).

If God knows everything (and if he has all power, can do anything he wants to do), why doesn’t he know how to make his special people do right?

The fact remains that if God is omniscient, he knows how to induce obedience. Hosea 6:4 documents at least one instance in which God confesses that he does not know how to do this. Therefore, God is not omniscient, at least not in some so-called absolute or comprehensive sense.

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If God is impassible, he will neither grieve, be pleased, nor be angry.
He is on occasion grieved, pleased, and angry.
Therefore, God is not impassible.

For at least seven centuries, the divine impassibility has been a common feature of Christian theology. Impassibility refers to the inability to experience emotion, especially suffering.

In very early Christian discussions of God as Father, Son, Spirit–Trinity–Jesus, the Son of God, was seen as so distinct from God the Father, that while it was affirmed that Jesus suffered on the cross, God did not suffer because God the Father (pater) was impassible. Those who differed were called patripassionists, and patripassionism was declared a heresy.

So, let’s suppose that God cannot experience emotion, and then examine God’s written story as inspired by the Spirit of God. I’ll not devote space to detail the references, but repeatedly the Bible speaks of God as: being well-pleased, being not-pleased, angry, loving, having compassion, hating, patient, long-suffering, frustrated, indeed having a rich emotional life.

Whatever this might mean upon further investigation, it does show that God experiences emotion. And it demonstrates that what we do or don’t do affects how God feels. God has affections, and God’s emotions are somewhat dependant on us.

If God is impassive, he has no feelings. But the written record gives irrefutable evidence of God’s feelings. So, it cannot be true that God is impassive.
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If God’s actions are not relative, then he will give no case-specific commands.
Most, if not all, of God’s commands are case-specific.
Therefore, God ‘s actions are relative.

God gave the Ten Commandments to Israel, not to Finland, Brazil, Zambia, and not to any other nation or people. God commanded the Israelites to march around Jericho for seven days. He did not tell them to use this maneuver against any other city. Jesus’ commands/teachings in the Sermon on the Mount were not addressed to the world, but to his followers.

Jesus told only one person, a rich man, to sell all he had, then follow him. He told only one woman to go call her husband. He did not tell everyone to wipe the dust from off their feet. He gave this order only to his apostles. Examples could be multiplied. You can check the book for yourself.

Another way of making the same point is to note that almost everything God says, almost everything that God Incarnate says, is directed to a specific person or group on a specific occasion.

It all depends on the situation. Just an example or two will suffice. Each prophet was addressing a particular historical occasion in Israel’s history. They were not standing on some high hill speaking God’s universal word for the entire world to heed. Jesus told only one person he needed to be born again, he offered living water only to one, he healed some because of their faith, others because of the faith of the faith of someone else. It all depended in the need of the situation; it was all occasion appropriate. God does not operate by some single inflexible plan.

If God’s actions are not relative, he will use the same approach in every situation, but he does not use just a single method. We may conclude then, that God’s actions are relative.
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If God is not relative, then Father/Spirit/Son do not relate.
Father/Spirit/Son do relate.
Therefore, God is relative.

This blog has gotten far too long today, so I will abbreviate some things that are obvious. The Father affirms his love of the Son; the Son prays to the Father; The Spirit validates the Son.

God is love. Love is not some kind of substance or principle. It is a relation between persons. God is love. God is trinitarian eternally. God is one God: Spirit Father, Son, in eternal relation, a singular community of love. Christians are not mere monotheists, they are trinitarian monotheists.

If God is not relative, there is no relation between the Son, the Spirit, and the Father. However, God is an eternal center of loving relation. God is relative.
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Many more reductios are possible. It is absurd to question the divine relativity. It is understandable historically that it is questioned, but in the light of the written and the living Word of God, it is an absurd question or challenge.

God is love. That is the eternal fundamental. All else we know of God is a partial of that love.