Dynamic theism

Rhetorically, many of the recent attacks on “classical theism” gain a foothold by characterizing classical theism as presenting a Hellenistic, static, and immobile God very much at odds with the dynamic, very Live God of Scripture.

It is time to challenge this rhetorical move, and reverse this charge. Those who attack classical theism are the ones with a static and immobile God. For classical theism, God is “pure act” and this describes, as David Hart says, a dynamism “endlessly more dynamic than any mere motion of change could ever be.” To put it another way, created change is an infinitely distant analogy to the true dynamism of the purus actus that is God.

Consider: To the extent that God is constituted as Love by the expression of His love in Jesus, to that extent God is not in Himself love. To the extent that God’s actions outside Himself are determinate of His being, to that extent He is something less than fully dynamic and active in Himself. If God needs to act outside Himself to be the fullness of active love, then there is something of inaction and unfulfilled love in Him.

Hart says, “God does not have to change or suffer in order to love us or show us mercy – he loved us when we were not, and by this very ‘mercy’ created us – and so, as love, he can overcome all suffering. This is true in two related and consequence senses: on the one hand, love is not originally a reaction but is the ontological possibility of every ontic action, the one transcendent act, the primordial generosity that is convertible with being itself, the blissful and desiring apatheia that requires no pathos to evoke it, no evil to make it good; and this is so, becuase, on the other hand, God’s infinitely accomplished life of love is that trinitarian movement of his being that is infinitely determinate – as determinacy toward the other – and so an indestructible actus purus endlessly more dynamic than and mere motion of change could ever be. In him there is neither variablenes nor shadow of turning because he is wholly free, wholly God as Father, Son, and Spirit, wholly alive, wholly love.”