Can God Be Acted Upon?

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At the recent William Lane Craig “Atonement” symposium at the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, Texas (about which I wrote most recently), I heard a theologian say that God cannot be acted upon. I’ve heard that before, but this time it sparked special thoughts about it.

That God cannot be acted upon means different things to different people, but its normal, usual meaning in theology is that God cannot be affected by anything outside himself in any way that would alter his eternal, unchanging bliss. I asked the theologian whether he believes that God can have any new experiences and his responses was ambiguous or else other conversations over rode it. (It was at a crowded table over lunch.)

I affirm that God can be acted upon insofar as God opens himself to it. In other words, if God chooses to be acted upon, he can be acted upon. That is, God can choose to be vulnerable, open to having new experiences caused by beings outside himself.

For example, the incarnation of God the Son in Jesus Christ was a new experience for God. God did not have to do that, but he chose to take on humanity, to grow in stature and wisdom and favor with God and man (Luke 2). He chose to open his life to suffering when his people were unfaithful and committed idolatry. He chose to open this life to suffering when he himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, experienced God-forsakenness on the cross.

It seems to me that traditional theism, especially in its Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic forms, has been overly influenced by Greek philosophy in the form of “perfect being ontology”—the assumption that a perfect being, such as God must necessarily be, must be invulnerable in eternal, unchanging bliss, unaffected internally by anything or anyone outside itself/himself. I see nothing in the Bible that supports this.

However, I do believe that the God of the Bible cannot be forced to undergo any new experiences; he can only have new experiences and suffer insofar as he chooses to make himself vulnerable.

Therefore, I stand between classical philosophical theism and process panentheism, rejecting both as inconsistent with the biblical portrait of God.

For more about this, see my book Essentials of Christian Thought: Seeing Reality through the Biblical Story (Zondervan) which I wished to be entitled Narrative Biblical Metaphysics.