Appendix: The Atonement in its Relation to God's Immutability
The atonement does not contradict God's immutability. The apparent difficulty is that reconciliation seems to imply a change of mind in God. The resolution: it is not God who changes but man. God's eternal and immutable will foresaw from eternity that, on condition of adequate satisfaction being offered, sinners would be restored to grace. The satisfaction of Christ objectively removed the obstacle — sin — that blocked the application of God's love to mankind; the change is entirely on the side of the creature. God wills good things immutably and accepts the atonement by the same eternal act by which He foreordained it. Schell's error — positing a real change in God as a result of the atonement — is implicitly refuted by this Thomistic analysis, which draws on the doctrine of divine immutability established in the first volume of the series.
Appendix: The Atonement in its Relation to God’s Immutability
APPENDIX THE ATONEMENT IN ITS RELATION TO GOD’S IMMUTABILITY There is another objection to the doctrine of Christ’s vicarious atonement which deserves a brief refutation because it has seemed so strong to at least one Catholic writer (Schell) that it has led him to substitute a new and false conception of the atonement for the traditional one of Catholic theology. This objection is based on the immutability of the Divine Essence and may be formulated as follows: The atonement implies a change of mind or heart in God, but there can be no change in God because He is actus purissimas. To assume a real change of mind or heart in God as a result of the atonement would indeed contradict the dogma of His immutability. But there is no such change involved in the dogma of the atonement, rightly understood. As the sun by means of the same -rays produces contrary effects, e. g. melts ice and dries out a swamp, according to the differing quality of matter, so the immutable will of God either hates or loves man according as his moral state renders him worthy or unworthy of divine favor. The change involved in the process of justification, therefore, is not in the least a change on the part of God, but entirely on the part of the sinner. God immutably loves that which is good and holy, whereas the sinner changes from evil to good. When we say that the passion of Our Lord ” appeased ” the divine wrath, we do not mean that (See page 39) 165
i66 APPENDIX it affected God after the manner of a real cause or motive and induced Him to change His mind or will. The divine intellect and the divine will are predetermined in and by themselves from all eternity and admit no external influence. In speaking of a reconciliation of God or the appeasement of His wrath, the Church and her theologians merely adapt themselves to the understanding of the people, and what they mean to inculcate is that the redemption of the human race was predetermined by God from all eternity solely on condition that adequate satisfaction would be given by the Godman. No matter whether the future Redemption be conceived as an absolute or as a hypothetical result of God’s predetermination, there is no trenching upon His immutability, because He inevitably foresaw the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of the condition and arranged His eternal plan of salvation accordingly. In the objective order of things God can will a future event either immutably in itself, or in connection with and as a consequence of some other event, which is related to the first as a cause to its effect. The causes involved in such a hypothetical decree of the divine will” operate entirely outside of the Divine Essence without in any wise influencing or changing that Essence.1 l See the chapter on ” God’s Immutability ” in the first volume of this series, God: His Knowability, Essenca, and Attributes, 2nd ed., pp. 298-305, St Louis 1 9 14; and P. Stufler’s paper, Die Erlosungstat Christi in ihrer Beziehung su Gott, in the Innsbruck Zeitschrift fur katholische Theologie, 1906, pp. 385 sqq.