Augustine’s Classical Toolbox

On a recent visit to see family, I was asked to assist with a small plumbing issue. It was a matter of routine maintenance, and I was happy to help and certain that the problem was within my (albeit limited) plumbing skills. So, I boldly approached the connection between two hoses with the intention to impress my family with what quick work I would make of the problem. I was ready to triumphantly declare victory before I even approached the hoses! But things did not go as planned. As simple and as routine as the task was, I was embarrassed to realize that I could not disconnect these two hoses. No matter how I tried, I could not get my hand around the connection. The angles were all wrong, the space too confined. I just couldn’t do it. My confidence diminished when I realized I was going to need a wrench.

It’s no secret that the right tool for the job makes the work easier. But some tools aren’t simply about convenience. Sometimes they’re absolutely necessary. You can’t saw a board into two pieces without… a saw! You can’t hammer a nail without… a hammer!

What I want to suggest is that reading Holy Scripture is no different. Without the proper interpretive tools, there are some things we simply cannot make sense of when reading Scripture. It is not that understanding Scripture is merely harder without them; it is that some kinds of scriptural reasoning are impossible without the proper tools. What’s more, there are tools that have lived in the Church’s interpretive toolbox for most of Christian history but remain almost completely unknown to modern Bible readers.

I want to introduce one very important tool for reading Scripture that Augustine made important use of. As we will see, once you have a wrench in your hand, the impossible suddenly looks pretty simple.What’s more, there are tools that have lived in the Church’s interpretive toolbox for most of Christian history but remain almost completely unknown to modern Bible readers. Share on X

Reading Scripture and Divine Immutability

It is a basic truth of Holy Scripture and the classical Christian tradition that God does not change. Divine immutability has been the consistent belief of the Church across the ages. And that for good reason. Most would concede it to be undesirable for God to change, say, from loving his people to hating his people, or from being all-powerful to impotent and weak. Such changes would be unworthy of the God who is believed, confessed, and worshiped by the Church. In its strongest form, divine immutability is hardly controversial.

Yet faithful readers of Holy Scripture are likely to find themselves confused at what sometimes appears to be divine change. Passages that suggest God changes his mind, relents from judgment, alters his plans, or reacts to human activity—these give the appearance of divine change. And yet immutability is a biblically derived doctrine that recognizes that Holy Scripture speaks, at times, in two different registers: one metaphysical, of God’s eternal nature in Godself, and the other of the creaturely experience of God. While the majority of Scripture speaks in the latter register—using creaturely terms and ways of speaking to describe the creaturely experience of God—it seems that, at times, God chooses to change registers in order to communicate the nature of his eternal being.[1]

Through the prophet Balaam, God makes the distinction between these two registers of speaking when he declares, “God is not a man that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind” (Num. 23:19). James 1:17 emphasizes the point, declaring, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” Similarly, and in the first person, God asserts in Malachi 3:6, “For I the Lord do not change.”

How then are faithful readers of Holy Scripture to read the many passages that speak as if God changes? Does God change or does He not?

Please pass the wrench.

Thankfully, St. Augustine has come to the aid of the Christian tradition by introducing a helpful distinction that makes the seemingly impossible task much simpler.

Augustine on Relational Changes

In De Trinitate, V.16-17, Augustine is pondering relational terms that are predicated of God. He asks the question: “[H]ow will we be able to maintain that relationship terms are not modifications with God, since nothing happens to him in time because he is not changeable…?”[2] To this seemingly intractable problem, he provides an elegant and helpful solution: relational change in the creature.

The best way to understand a relational change in the creature is by way of example. Before looking at Augustine’s scriptural examples, a more commonplace illustration.

Imagine James and John standing by the Sea of Galilee. Assuming the truth of the claim, we could state the following: “James is taller than John.” Now, imagine that on account of his high-protein, pescatarian diet, John has a surprising and significant overnight growth spurt, such that the following day James and John are again standing by the Sea of Galilee, and we can now truthfully claim, “James is shorter than John.” The question is, “Did James change?” No. James’s height has not changed. John is the one who has changed. However, over two days, we were able to say three things: (a) “James is taller than John”; (b) “James is shorter than John”; (c) “James’ height did not change”. And even though both (a) and (b) are apparently contradictory predications of James, both statements are true. James did not change. John has changed, and with John’s change has come a change of relation between John and James that makes the varying predications of James possible.

Fundamentally, Augustine sees passages that describe God changing to be just these kinds of relational changes in the creature—not ontological changes in the nature of God. God is immutable. The change, rather, is a change in the relation to God that occurs on account of creaturely change in time.

Augustine begins with a non-theological example. A coin, he suggests, cannot be called “the price of something” until it takes on a relationship toward the object being purchased. While at one time it was not the price of something, it subsequently becomes the price of something. All the while, its nature as a coin is entirely unchanged. No change has occurred in the coin. A change of relation has occurred between the coin and the object being purchased.

Moving on to more theological matters, Augustine looks at Psalm 90:1, where the Vulgate declares, “Lord, you have become our refuge.” Augustine says,

God is called our refuge by way of relationship; the name has reference to us. And he becomes our refuge when we take refuge in him. Does this mean that something happens in his nature that was not there before we took refuge in him? No, the change takes place in us; we were worse before we took refuge in him, and we became better by taking refuge in him. But in him, no change at all.

Another example from Augustine is the declaration that God is our Father.

So too, He begins to be our Father when we are born again by his grace, because He gave us the right to become sons of God (Jn 1:12). So our substance changes for the better when we are made His sons; at the same time He begins to be our Father, but without any change in His substance.

As a sort of interpretive rule, Augustine summarizes:

So it is clear that anything that can begin to be said about God in time which was not said about him before is said by way of relationship, and yet not by way of a modification of God, as though something has modified him. It is however said by way of a modification of that with reference to which God begins to be called it.

On account of his broader argument in Book V of De Trinitate, Augustine’s examples are primarily concerned with titles for God: refuge, Father, friend. Yet, he sees all talk of change in God to be relational changes in the creature. When God “is said to be angry with the wicked and pleased with the good, they change, not he,” declares Augustine.

It is important to note that Augustine’s concept of a relational change in the creature was nothing new. Long before Augustine, Aristotle made similar distinctions in his Metaphysics. But Augustine brought the distinction into Christian theology. Coming after him, Boethius went on to make the same distinction in his own work on the Trinity.[3] Later still, Aquinas would take up the same distinction and develop it further.[4] More recently, modern logicians from the 1960s onwards, following P.T. Geach, have sometimes come to call a relational change a “Cambridge change” because this kind of distinction was frequently deployed by metaphysically-minded logicians at Cambridge University.[5] Yet this long-ago established and frequently appropriated distinction is almost entirely unknown to modern Bible readers. And without that important interpretive tool, modern Bible readers are prone to confuse the two registers of biblical speech and assume, despite God’s own revelation to the contrary, that God changes.

Reading Holy Scripture with an understanding of the relational change in the creature is, then, crucial for reading in a way that rightly honors God as he has revealed himself. It is an interpretive principle that allows readers of Holy Scripture to read with the Great Tradition and to confidently believe, confess, and teach that God is immutable.

With this Augustinian wrench in hand, how then should we proceed?

Reading Scripture with a New Tool

Having a new tool is helpful, but knowing how to use it is even more important. What suggestions might Augustine have for modern Bible readers who have been newly introduced to the relational change in the creature?

First, readers of Scripture should take great care to discern in which register any particular passage is speaking. Are predications of God being made of the eternal, infinite, and immutable nature of God sans creation, or of God’s relative dealings with creation in time? This distinction has a long theological pedigree that acknowledges a difference between God’s absolute perfections (e.g., omniscient, omnipotent, etc.) and God’s relative perfections (e.g., patient, merciful, etc.). The latter can only be said of God in relation to creation, whereas the former are properly predicated of God in eternity, even if creation had never come to be. Thus, Augustine would exhort modern readers of Scripture to ask, “Can X be said of God in eternity, or only in time in relation to creation?”

Second, if a given passage is speaking in the latter, call it the “creaturely” register, then the reader must ask, “What has occurred in the creaturely plane to make this predication possible?” If God is said to “repent”, as Genesis 6:7 does, then the reader should ask what has changed in relation to God’s unchanging nature. Because of the “wickedness of humankind”, there was a change in relation in the creature. Here, Augustine would say, “It is creatures who have changed, not God.” James is taller than John; James is shorter than John; James did not change. Similarly, God is pleased with creation; God is not pleased with creation; God did not change. This is a change of relation and not a change in God. Augustine would exhort readers to ask, “What changed in creation to explain this apparent change in God?”“It is creatures who have changed, not God.” -Augustine Share on X

Finally, and importantly, readers of Scripture should take the inspired language thereof with unwavering seriousness. It is not as though statements that predicate change of God are untrue. They are not some desert mirage that, upon closer inspection, turns out to be illusory. No, they are true statements made in a particular manner; true statements made of and by a holy, eternal, uncreated, infinite, and ultimately mysterious God who superabundantly overflows the bounds of language. Thus, the nature of God is such that it requires all language about God to be accommodated language. How could it be otherwise? It is creaturely language (And what other kind is there?) that is referring to the uncreated Creator of all things.[6] Speech about God is always accommodated language, and as such, it is a precious and good gift from God that He has chosen to reveal Himself to us—sometimes in the high and holy, if rare, register of absolute predicates, but also and especially in the earthy, creaturely, vernacular of human experience.

For Augustine, the relational change in the creatore isn’t an optional tool in the interpreter’s toolbox. No, it is the necessary wrench for making sense not only of Holy Scripture but of the Gospel itself. For Augustine declares, “It is unthinkable that God should love someone temporally, as though with a new love that was not in him before, seeing that with him things past do not pass and things future have already happened. So he loved all his saints before the foundation of the world (Jn 17:24; Eph 1:4).” We were objects of God’s wrath. We are now loved, accepted, and redeemed.

God did not change. We did. Praise be to God forever!

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Endnotes

[1] Langdon Gilkey has warned against the modern slide toward univocity that has, inter alia, flattened out Scripture and dissolved the distinction between these registers. See, “Cosmology, Ontology, and the Travail of Biblical Language” in God’s Activity in the World: The Contemporary Problem, ed. Owen C. Thomas (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1983).

[2] All quotations are from St. Augustine, The Trinity (De Trinitate), trans. Edmund Hill, OP. (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1991). All italics original.

[3] Boethius, De Trinitate, IV.

[4] Thomas Aquinas, De Potentia III.3 resp.; Summa Theologiae, Ia.13.7; 45.3 ad 1.

[5] Peter T. Geach, God and the Soul (London: Routledge, 1969).

[6] From the very first page of the Bible, the eternal and incorporeal God who has no mouth or lips, “speaks” without soundwaves out of a spaceless, timeless nihilo.

Image credit: ILA D (ilad1124).