To put it differently, God’s actuality adapts to humanity’s actions, prayers, sins, and cultural changes. He is divine, yet He is also relatable and personal. It is precisely this thinking that provides a foundation for the well-intentioned, but cringe-worthy, Christian catch-phrase, “It’s a relationship, not a religion”.

There are movements within Evangelical Christianity that are loosening on the classical doctrines of God, namely Divine Simplicity. Rejecting Classical Theism’s doctrines of the immutability and impassibility of God, many operate within an economy that suggests there are aspects of God’s being that are subject to influence by the god-human relationship. While His essence and divine character may be holy and fixed, His relatability to humanity is capable of being swayed. To put it differently, God’s actuality adapts to humanity’s actions, prayers, sins, and cultural changes. He is divine, yet He is also relatable and personal. It is precisely this thinking that provides a foundation for the well-intentioned, but cringe-worthy, Christian catch-phrase, “It’s a relationship, not a religion”.

Aside from the fact that this relationship-centric Christian-ese phrase creates false contrariety – by suggesting one of these things is completely unlike the other – this logic is poor and stands opposed to the historic, Christian faith. Lest we forget, most heresies begin with an underlying error in the understanding of God’s being. The doctrine of God, and how we relate to him, is critical and worthy of regular discussion, contemplation, and prayer. What we know to be true of God will touch and drive every part of our spiritual life. There is no knowledge beyond God and truly, no greater task worth pursuing.

We must know God rightly if we are to know Him at all.

Let me begin by clarifying that not all evangelicals who deny the tenets of Classical Theism or Divine Simplicity are heretics. Personally, I think most are just uninformed and unaware that their framework for understanding how we relate to the divine is substantially skewed. They have unknowingly adopted Theistic Mutualism as their theological framework.

This was me at one point; I didn’t know what I didn’t know.  The assumptions I made about God’s being were not founded in scripture. I was unaware that I had been influenced by decades of misguided theologians and philosophers seeking to make God more personal and less transcendent (much of which, I’ll add, finds its roots all the way back to The Enlightenment).

At a glance, this relational-softening of God might seem attractive, logical, and maybe even biblical. We hear all the time that God is a personal God and we read in scripture evidences of God responding to situations with an appropriate display of compassion, anger, wrath, love, etc. In many cases, He even appears to change His position or plan, after some outside influence. Likewise, a fully transcendent God can be hard to grasp; He is big and abstract. It takes hard work and meditation to discern truth from fiction. It’s much easier to comprehend a God that is like, well, us.  Most of us want genuine interaction, but convince ourselves without a flexible, emotional, and relatable component to God this is impossible. After all, any meaningful human relationship is based on some balance of give-and-take. We pray and petition because we desire other realities in our life. We want God to hear us, change His mind, and honor our requests.

For reference, consider the following verses:

• Psalm 106:23: “Therefore he said he would destroy them had not Moses, his chosen one, stood in the breach before him, to turn away his wrath from destroying them.”
• Judges 2:18: “Whenever the Lord raised up a judge for them, he was with the judge and saved them out of the hands of their enemies as long as the judge lived; for the Lord relented because of their groaning under those who oppressed and afflicted them.”
• Genesis 6:6: “And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart”

So, what’s so controversial? Well, the problem centers in how we understand the driven force of these responses from God. If it’s only us and prayer, then the economy of influence we have with God is not too dissimilar from that of the gods found within Greek Mythology. We possess the power to draw some alternate desired reality from God. God, though in supply of infinite power and knowledge, is ours to try and manipulate. I use this word objectively, and not in a strictly negative sense, as often our prayers are for something good and just. Yet, like Moses in the verse above, we act because we want to revise God’s position on a matter.

Peradventure, let’s pretend we think God to not be compassionate enough in a certain situation, but after intense prayer, fasting, and reasoning with God, He complies and divinely expresses the desired and proper compassion. Logically, this means the petitioner possesses some unique insight into the situation that God must not have. This person has enlightened God’s understanding and convinced Him that He ought to be more compassionate, given this and that. In this scenario, God is not immutable and certainly not omniscient. Instead, He is adapting and by way of outside influence, becoming a more enlightened version of Himself.

Clearly, this is nonsense. God is eternally perfect in every way. He is the single standard by which we understand all things to be good and true. Yet, this is how many Christians practically carry out their relationship with God.

Consider these words by Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck on the errors of a relationship-driven human-god economy. He writes, “The difference between the creator and the creatures hinges on the contrast between being and becoming” (Reformed Dogmatics, 2:156).

If God is ever “becoming” anything else, then He is lacking something and not divine; He would not be God. This is a fundamental difference between what it means to be human and what it means to be God. One is “being” (eternal, unchanging, perfect, all-knowing) and other is always “becoming” something else based on his/her experiences.

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