This well-argued volume is an antidote to the decline of sympathy for the doctrine of divine immutability in modernity and its aftermath. According to Heffner, modernity’s disenchantment with the doctrine is twofold. The first is the suspicion that talk of immutability portrays God as detached from the suffering and instability of God’s creatures. The second is a post-Kantian skepticism about any metaphysics, particularly one that conceptualises God in terms of substance.
Against these qualms, the author argues that Kierkegaard developed a compelling defense of God’s changelessness that dispensed with any foundational metaphysics. Rather than having recourse to an analysis of being, Kierkegaard developed an ‘existential’ case for the doctrine of immutability in terms of the self’s struggle for continuity and coherence. Without a relation to the changeless God, the self is faced with disintegration. Heffner admirably succeeds in articulating Kierkegaard’s alternative defense of divine immutability.
The author uses ‘metaphysics’ in the narrow sense of gaining knowledge of God from reflection on the properties of the created being. For example, a popular argument has been that God must be changeless because any movement from possibility to actuality would be an imperfection inappropriate for divinity. Against this approach, the author argues persuasively that Kierkegaard based his claims about God’s changelessness from the self’s encounter with the immutable God in time. Kierkegaard’s strategy is more Christological and biblical than ontological, as his reliance upon the Epistle of James reveals.
For Hefner, one of Kierkegaard’s most central existential problems was the forging and preservation of personal identity in the midst of change. Any effort to establish the self’s continuity through a relation to externalities is doomed to frustration, for external things are ephemeral. Consequently, the self’s narrative of its life, its directionality and its hopes would keep mutating. This transience and flux manifest the inability of the self to secure itself and its inevitable disintegration.
As Hefner ably shows, for Kierkegaard God’s immutability can remain the self’s focus through every change, giving it perdurance and cohesion. The theological virtues of faith, hope and love are the fruits of the self’s resting in God through life’s fluctuating circumstances. Faith in the changeless God reintegrates the self’s narrative, hope preserves the self’s teleology by concentrating on the goal of eternity and love restructures the self’s intentions so that they endure through time. The self is enabled to receive changing circumstances as gifts from the changeless God. The expectancy of eternity inspires resilience and buoyancy that are independent of unreliable empirical probabilities. The highest-order intention to love the immutable God governs all subordinate intentions across time.
Hefner argues that for Kierkegaard God’s ‘good and perfect gift’ was simply the self’s relation to the changeless God, which grounds the self’s endurance. According to Hefner, immutability does not just characterise the constancy of the divine giving; changelessness is not just the ontological ground of God’s actions ad extra. Rather, God gives God’s very own changeless self to the individual through the Incarnation. The experience in time of God’s immutability is itself soteriological, for it gives the self-stability and reintegration.
Hefner concludes that this existential case for the classical doctrine of God’s immutability can be plausible and attractive to a modernity that has lost confidence in grand metaphysical schemes. The turn to the subject’s experience of disintegration can appeal to the contemporary need for hope for a coherent life. At the same time, Hefner argues that this exercise in theological retrieval is not governed by the prejudices of modernity, for its starting point is the revelation of God in Christ.
Hefner adds that his claim about Kierkegaard’s existential account of divine immutability is not anti-metaphysical, for his case does involve philosophical reflection on the self’s immersion in temporality. In a way, it is a transcendental argument asking what must be true of God if the self is to be reintegrated. It is an inquiry into the condition for the possibility of a cohesive life. In order for God to be the ground of the self’s continuing identity, God must be beyond the polarities that make change inevitable. To be complete, Kierkegaard’s account requires the classical doctrine of divine immutability.
This conclusion raises two questions. First, perhaps Kierkegaard had a deeper disquietude with metaphysics than the problem of ‘starting from below’ suggests. His remarks about communication in his projected lecture series and Climacus’ observations in Concluding Unscientific Postscript suggest that subjective pathos must be a component of any religious communication. Without that, the discourse becomes meaningless. Therefore, the objective mood of metaphysics and its argumentation produces unintelligible pseudo-discourse, no matter what its starting point might be.
Secondly, Hefner may over-emphasize the threat of disintegration as the motivation that draws people to Christ. Kierkegaard often stresses the sheer attractiveness of God’s self-giving, suffering love. In texts like Works of Love immutability seems to be valued as an attribute of that love, rather than as the primary attraction. Perhaps Kierkegaard was more like Karl Barth on this score than like a Neo-Platonist.
It is a testimony to the excellence of the book that it provokes such important questions and invites further explorations.
