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The Immutability or Unchangeability of God is an attribute that "God is unchanging in his character, will, and covenant promises." [1] The Westminster Shorter Catechism says that "[God] is a spirit, whose being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth are infinite, eternal, and unchangeable." Those things do not change.
[18] Millard Erickson calls this attribute God's constancy. [3] The immutability of God is being increasingly criticized by advocates of open theism, [19] which argues that God is open to influence through the prayers, decisions, and actions of people.
Classical theism is characterized by a set of core attributes that define God as absolute, perfect, and transcendent. These attributes include divine simplicity, aseity, immutability, eternality, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence, each of which has been developed and refined through centuries of philosophical and theological discourse.
Thus scriptural expressions which indicate "anger" or "sadness" on God's part are considered anthropomorphisms, mere analogies to explain mankind's relationship to God, who is impassible in his own nature. Some objecting to this claim assert that if God cannot have emotions, then God cannot love, which is a central tenet of Christianity.
Process theology does not deny that God is in some respects eternal (will never die), immutable (in the sense that God is unchangingly good), and impassible (in the sense that God's eternal aspect is unaffected by actuality), but it contradicts the classical view by insisting that God is in some respects temporal, mutable, and passible.
According to Thomas Aquinas, God is God's existence and God's essence is God's existence. [2] Divine simplicity is the hallmark of God's transcendence of all else, ensuring that the divine nature is beyond the reach of ordinary categories and distinctions (or, at least, their ordinary application).
The Westminster Shorter Catechism is a catechism written in 1646 and 1647 by the Westminster Assembly, a synod of English and Scottish theologians and laymen intended to bring the Church of England into greater conformity with the Church of Scotland.
Theosis (Ancient Greek: θέωσις), or deification (deification may also refer to apotheosis, lit. "making divine"), is a transformative process whose aim is likeness to or union with God, as taught by the Eastern Catholic Churches and the Eastern Orthodox Church; the same concept is also found in the Latin Church of the Catholic Church, where it is termed "divinization".