Book Review: All That Is In God by James Dolezal

All That is in God (Reformation Heritage Books, 2017) was written by James Dolezal in an attempt to explicate two vastly different conceptions of God within Protestantism: historic classical theism and theistic mutualism. Dolezal believes that the exodus of Christian thinkers from the classical theist position to a mutualist one has caused us to begin reading the Bible differently from how it was historically read. A reason for this is the abandoning of ‘contemplative theology’, which, while acknowledging the essentiality of Scripture in revealing to us God’s role in redemption, treats God as an ahistorical being; a being who is better understood by thinking through logical implications from what one discovers in both creation and Scripture. These implications include negative attributes like immutability and positive ones like omnipotence. The book is aimed at bringing readers back to this latter traditional understanding of God.

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In Chapter 1, Dolezal outlines the theistic mutualism in detail. He describes it as a position that thinks univocally about God, perceiving Him as a ‘person’ who interacts with the world just like other persons, albeit on a grander scale; this involves Him being in time and being affected by His creatures. Mutualists advocate for ‘becoming’ in God, stating that He changes in how He relates to His creation. They use Scripture to argue that God is capable of passions, including things like regret. They go on to claim that God is immutable in one sense and mutable in another, simple in one sense and complex in another, etc. The problem with such a view, Dolezal says, is that it makes essentially-correlative human relations to be the standard by which we judge the God-creation relation; it borders on having idolatrous implications.

In Chapter 2, Dolezal addresses immutability. He explicates the classical theist position using philosophical and biblical evidence; he discusses aseity and pure actuality to explain how change in God due to his relation with His creation diminishes God’s fullness in all his attributes, for it implies that there is something God lacks that He then gains from interacting with His creation. He addresses the language of mutability used of God in Scripture, stating that this is no different from various passages that also attribute body parts to God; it involves figurative language that communicates something true about God; it is God’s way revealing Himself in a way accessible to us. The mutualists believe that God isn’t absolutely immutable; He is open to change because He enters into a relationship with His creation and is affected by it. Immutability to them is an imperfection that makes God incapable of something. Dolezal concludes that mutualists worship a God, in a sense, who lives and moves and has His being in His creation; this view forces one to redefine all of God’s other attributes. In Chapter 3, Dolezal explains divine simplicity. God is simple in that He is not made of parts; anything made of parts depends on those components to exist, and if He were made of parts, God would depend on these parts (and whatever put these parts together) to exist. The implications of such simplicity include that God’s essence and existence are not distinct but are the same thing; it also means that all of His attributes are identical to His essence, for to have distinct attributes that make up His essence would have Him dependent on the source of the attributes He instantiates. Dolezal then outlines a biblical case for simplicity. He delineates three Biblical doctrines about God, namely independence, infinity, and creation, complete with corroborating references, pointing out that each of these imply a simple God. He also cites figures from throughout church history, starting with Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Augustine from the Patristic period, who affirmed simplicity as an essential doctrine.

In Chapter 4, he explains why mutualists reject simplicity. One reason is that the doctrine appears to have counterintuitive implications, such as being unable to speak of God in ‘subject+predicate’ form and God’s inability to be affected by His creation. Mutualists react to this linguistic barrier in three ways; they disregard divine simplicity; they deny simplicity, mostly on the basis of it’s counterintuitive claim that God is identical to His properties; or, they distort simplicity to mean something different that fits their theology. To the general objection, Dolezal states that there is no Scriptural warrant for assuming that our language must comprehend God; Scripture treats God as unfathomable. It seems more appropriate to assume that God accommodates His revelation within our limited language, mostly by speaking using analogies from His creation.

In Chapter 5, Dolezal addresses divine eternity, stating that God does not undergo successive states of being, doesn’t move from potentiality to actuality, and has no past or future. Our inability to describe God without temporal language shouldn’t bother us; Scripture does the same, even when describing divine eternity. He describes the Biblically-supported doctrines of infinity, immutability, and simplicity as supporting divine eternity, aside from Biblical evidence for the same. He then describes three unbiblical approaches that differ from the classical conception of eternity: a temporal ‘everlasting’ God; a ‘timeless-turned-temporal God; and a ‘timeless-and-temporal God’. Finally, Dolezal explains how being Creator isn’t something that God becomes; firstly, God’s role as Creator isn’t divorced from His being, like all His other attributes; secondly, the name ‘Creator’ is a relative name that denotes an absolute reality, for it is something that God begins to be called by us upon our realizing a way He relates to us, albeit while denoting something real in Him that has always been true of Him; lastly, an understanding of creation as being an eternal act with a temporal effect, an act that is part of God’s eternal decree.

In Chapter 6, Dolezal argues how simplicity is essential to understanding the Trinity; without it, it seems easy to fall into a compositional view of God, one that borders on tritheism. He spends time explicating the various historical affirmations of the unity of God within the Trinity, including that of all three persons being of the ‘same substance’ and of there being only ‘one being’, before identifying Biblical prooftexts that imply the same. He examines the distinctness of each person of the Trinity, stating that the distinction is only between the persons, and not between the persons and the divine essence. The distinctions like in relations, such as the paternity of the Father, the filiation of the Son and the spirated procession of the Spirit; the traditional view is that these relations are identical to the persons, just as God’s attributes are in divine simplicity. This might seem a strange view of relations, but that is only because we are speaking of something unique to God while being forced to express it in limited human language. Finally, he critiques compositional models of the Trinity, most importantly social trinitarianism, responding to each of them.

Dolezal closes the book by highlighting the vast divide in how classical theists and mutualists view God. Several theologians have tried to stand somewhere in between, by redefining several of classical theism’s terms to mean something that the mutualist would likely accept, but as Dolezal points out, this ‘both/and’ approach either ends up in contradiction or endorses a blatantly mutualist position. He concludes by asserting that mutualism is an approach that undermines both the biblical and historical conception of God due to its anthropocentric approach to doing theology, and reiterating the claim that it, alongside all other replacements for classical theism, fall short of accepting that “all that is in God is God.” This book will appeal to those who come to it from a Reformed, Thomist, or any other view that accepts the classical theist view, given that it helps them better understand the historic doctrine of God promoted by their respective traditions. The theistic mutualist, on the other hand, might not be attracted to it; they can raise a valid criticism that Dolezal does not spend as much time in bringing out the mutualist counterarguments to his arguments. Nonetheless, the mutualist also can benefit from it by better understanding the classical theist view, avoiding the many strawmen promulgated by non-adherents. One place I would have liked Dolezal to address would’ve be on how the Incarnation doesn’t violate the doctrine of divine simplicity; a topic that he (rather strangely) leaves unaddressed.