“For I Am God, Not a Man”

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Old Testament reveals a God of ardent involvement in the life of his people, a God prepared to repent of threatened judgment when sinful human beings turn back to him in faith. It also reveals the constancy and transcendence of God and emphasizes that God does not repent. Recent efforts to integrate these components of Old Testament teaching are sometimes critical of older metaphorical or anthropopathic readings of the repentance passages and sometimes argue that God changes his mind with regard to some elements of his salvific plan but not with regard to others. Often this is intended to underscore that, over against the divine in philosophical theology, the God of Israel is truly invested in the history of the world. In this article I argue that the Old Testament’s own Creator-creature distinction provides a stronger starting point for integrating the repentance and constancy of God in the biblical text. This approach involves a retrieval and clarification of the metaphorical reading of the divine repentance passages with its distinct confirmation of God’s personal involvement in history.