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An objection that has been raised against the doctrine of divine immutability pertains to the Incarnation. [1] It seems that the Second Person of the Trinity taking on human flesh represents a change in God. But does it? This is an age-old question, which the fathers of the Church noted and addressed. Taking on humanity does not denote a change in the being of God; rather, in the Incarnation, divinity takes on—not converts to —a human nature (a real being) becoming the person of Jesus Christ. According to Chalcedonian Christology, the one and the same Christ is to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ. [2] The precise language of the incarnati...

A summary from Summa Contra Gentiles – book 1: God God is eternal. That which has a beginning and ending begins and ends through motion or change. God is absolutely immutable; no beginning; no end. [1] Beginning and ending beings are measured by time, which is the measurement of motion——the measurement of change. Because God is without motion, he is not measured by time. “There is, therefore, no before and after in Him.” [2] He has no succession in his being. . . . “He has his whole being at once.” [3] If God existed after not existing, then ‘someone’ brought him into being from non-being. And it cannot have been God, since “what does not exist does not act.” [4] Nothing is prior to God, and he will never cease to exist; therefore, he is everlastingly eternal. There are beings in the world that have come into being and perish. Therefore, they have a cause, since what does not have being at one time and then has being owes its existence to some cause. [5] Therefore, a necessary...

In Monologium , XXIX, Anselm moves into a discussion of God’s self-expression, which is an examination of the Spirit’s expression ( locutio ) through which all things were created. Prior to this section, Anselm, to his satisfaction, demonstrated that the Spirit alone exists absolutely, from and through himself, and his creatures he created from nothing. But Anselm wants to understand God’s act of creating ( ex nihilo for Anselm does not mean God created something from nothing; rather, it means God did not create from anything before, other than, or apart from God). [1] Anselm’s logic of the creative Being’s simple essence in the act of creation means that because it created everything through itself, as an expression of itself, how can it “be anything else than what the Spirit himself is?” [2] But because what is created cannot be what it is until later, after having been created through another, Anselm reasons, that the Spirit’s “expression itself can be conceived of as nothing els...