There is an old maxim: the only constant is change.

We know what it means. Everything around us changes. We grow older.

Relationships change. Institutions evolve. Technology transforms the way we live. Even our understanding of ourselves changes.

Change is simply part of being human.

But what if we applied the maxim to God? Does God change?

For many people, including many who would not describe themselves as religious, the answer seems obvious: No. God is the one thing that does not change.

There is good reason for that answer. Christian theology has often spoken of God as eternal, perfect and unchanging.

Human beings change because we are incomplete. We learn, develop, forget, make mistakes and sometimes become better people. God, by contrast, has nothing to learn and nothing to become.

This way of thinking about God has deep philosophical roots. Aristotle spoke of the “unmoved mover”: that which ultimately explains movement and change without itself being moved or changed.

The image is a powerful one. Everything in the universe is moving, changing, becoming.

But behind it all is God, the One who does not move, does not change, does not become.

There is something reassuring about this. In a changing world, God is the fixed point, the unmoved mover.

But the very thing that makes the image reassuring can also make it troubling. What happens when this unchanging God encounters a changing world?

What happens when we suffer? When someone we love dies? When a child is born? When a person changes direction in life? Does none of this make any difference to God?

I first encountered a phrase that has stayed with me for nearly 40 years when I was a theological student in the 1980s. It was the title of a book by a German theologian Eberhard Jungel: God’s Being is in Becoming.

It is a wonderfully provocative phrase. It sounds almost like a challenge to the image of the unmoved mover.

Jungel was not suggesting that God is an unfinished being who is gradually becoming more perfect. Nor was he saying that God changes in the way that we change, as though God were learning from experience or discovering things that God did not previously know.

His argument was more subtle. Jungel directs our attention to the Gospel accounts of Jesus, in which faith encounters God entering human existence.

In that narrative, as readers contemplate the mysteries of the cross and the empty tomb, they see divine vulnerability and suffering.

For Jungel, this is ultimately a story about God’s self-giving love.

Becoming, in this sense, does not mean that God becomes something God previously was not. Rather, God’s being is disclosed in an event, in God’s entering the history of the world in Jesus Christ and giving God’s self for us.

For Jungel, “becoming” is not about God changing from one state into another. It is about recognising that God’s being is relational and active rather than static and self-contained.

That raises an interesting possibility. Perhaps we have too readily assumed that change and perfection are opposites.

We usually think of change as evidence of imperfection or incompletion. If something changes, perhaps it was not complete in the first place.

But there are changes that are not signs of failure. A child becomes an adult. A stranger becomes a friend.

A person who has never cared about an issue becomes passionate about justice. A parent is changed by the birth of a child. The suffering of a loved one changes us.

In each case, change can be the consequence of relationship.

Indeed, to love someone is to become vulnerable to them. What happens to them matters to us. Their joy affects us, their suffering causes us pain.

To love someone is to be moved by them, to allow what happens to them to make a difference to us.

Jüngel’s phrase invites us to think of God’s constancy, not as the constancy of a stone, unchanged because nothing happens to it, but as the constancy of love.

The God revealed in Jesus Christ is not distant from human vulnerability. God enters it.

For me, the Gospel story, encountered again and again in pastoral life, suggests that God’s love is not diminished by entering into the changing, fragile and sometimes painful circumstances of human lives.

Rather, it is precisely there, in vulnerability, suffering, loss and love, that we encounter its depth.

Forty years on, after years of reading theology and listening to people tell the stories of their lives, I still find Jungel’s phrase compelling.

It names a God whose constancy is not the absence of change, but the faithfulness of love within it: God’s being is in becoming.

 

  • Graham Redding is a lecturer in Chaplaincy Studies, University of Otago.