Interaction is the back-and-forth the scriptural story is full of: God speaks, Israel answers, God responds. But interaction needs both sides to be in it: sequence, give-and-take, two parties that persist through the exchange. The classical doctrines put every one of those features on the creature's side only, which leaves a one-sided relation that is not really *inter*-action at all.

*What the tradition holds.* The doctrine of divine interaction holds that God acts upon, communicates with, and is responsive to creatures while remaining timeless, immutable, impassible, and absolutely simple. Aquinas treats the relation as one of pure asymmetry: creatures are really related to God, but God is only logically related to creatures (*Summa Theologiae* I.13.7), so that what scripture calls God's "turning toward" or "drawing near" is a change in the creature rather than in God. Boethius secures the same point through eternity-as-*tota simul*: God's act of providence is a single, undivided gaze on the whole temporal order, and what appears to us as sequential response is, in him, one timeless willing (*Consolation* V.6). Anselm and the Reformed scholastics inherit this picture and harden it: the impassibility tradition (Augustine, *City of God* IX.5; Aquinas, *ST* I.20.1 ad 1; Turretin, *Institutes* III.xi) treats every scriptural ascription of grief, anger, or change-of-mind as anthropopathism: accommodation to creaturely modes of speech rather than literal predication.

Yet the same tradition affirms that Yahweh struck Egypt, spoke from Sinai, walked the wilderness with Israel, took flesh in the womb of Mary, ate fish on a shore, wrote in the dust, and at every point bilaterally engaged particular creatures at particular times. The doctrine, then, is double-handed: God interacts, but every feature of interaction (sequence, responsiveness, persistence of relata, affect, mind-change, physical contact) is denied of the divine side and located only in the creature.

*What cannot be answered.* The interrogation of interaction asks how a being defined by timelessness, immutability, impassibility, and simplicity can be the subject of any of the predicates that make scriptural narrative legible as encounter.

**Q1.** *How can a being whose life is one timeless, immutable act be the subject of sequence — acting, then being acted upon, then acting again?* The back-and-forth is constitutive of interaction, not incidental to it. Boethius's *tota simul* eternity collapses this sequence into a single timeless act. Stump and Kretzmann's ET-simultaneity -(Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, 1981) attempts to recover bilateral structure within timelessness, but the recovery requires that distinct temporal beats register as distinct in God, which is what the doctrine of immutability was meant to deny: the objection Mullins develops at length in *The End of the Timeless God* -(Mullins, R. T., 2016). Mullins -(Mullins, R. T., 2016), Wolterstorff -(Nicholas Wolterstorff, 1975), and Hasker -(William Hasker, 1989) argue that the scriptural picture (Moses pleading, God relenting, the conversation continuing) is unintelligible without temporal sequence in God himself. Tradition's reply preserves the doctrines by emptying the narrative of any feature that could make it interaction rather than monologue.

**Q2.** *How can a being that is acted upon by nothing be bilaterally responsive, as interaction requires?* The wilderness account is structured by call and answer: Israel cries, God responds; Israel rebels, God grieves; Moses intercedes, God turns. Impassibility (Weinandy, Thomas G., 2000); cf. (Helm, Paul, 2010) denies that God is acted upon. Open theism (Clark H. Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker and David Basinger, 1994); (Gregory A. Boyd, 2001); (John Sanders, 1998) accepts the bilateral structure and surrenders the doctrine. The classical tradition retains the doctrine and reads the bilateral structure as unilateral accommodation, but accommodation is a mode of divine action, not of divine *inter*-action, and the *inter* is what the predicate names.

**Q3.** *How can interaction hold between relata that persist across time on both sides, when divine simplicity grants real relation only on the creature's side?* The forty-year engagement with Israel is not a series of unrelated acts but a continuous relation. Divine simplicity (Dolezal, James E., 2017) holds that there are no real relations in God — every relation is in the creature side only. But a relation that is one-sided is not, in the ordinary sense, a relation; and an interaction whose relata persist only on one side is not interaction.

**Q4.** *How can an impassible being track engagement affectively, as the wilderness narratives mark it?* The wilderness narratives mark engagement by registers of divine feeling: grief at the calf (Exodus 32:14 NRSVUE), kindled anger at Kibroth-hattaavah (Numbers 11:33), the heavy-with-glory *kābēd* response at Korah (Numbers 16:42). Impassibility (Helm, Paul, 2010); (Dolezal, James E., 2017) reads each of these as anthropopathism; open theism (Clark H. Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker and David Basinger, 1994); (John Sanders, 1998) reads them as literal divine affect. Tradition cannot have both the literal text and the doctrine: it must subtract one.

**Q5.** *How can an immutable being change his mind, as the texts repeatedly say God does?* *Nāḥam* (to repent, to relent, to grieve into a different course) is used of God at Exodus 32:14 (Moses talks Yahweh out of destroying Israel), Genesis 6:6 (Yahweh regrets making humanity), 1 Samuel 15:11 (Yahweh regrets making Saul king), and Jonah 3:10 (Yahweh relents from destroying Nineveh). Each is the verbal form whose literal sense is a turning. The impassibility tradition reads each as anthropopathism, but the texts are not merely emotive: they record a different downstream course of divine action contingent on a creature-side act. Either the divine course is genuinely contingent on the creature-side act (and immutability fails) or the contingency is illusory (and the text is false at its surface).

**Q6.** *How can an incorporeal being engage the physical world by contact, as interaction with it appears to require?* The doctrine of omnipotence (George I. Mavrodes, 1963); (Alvin Plantinga, 1967); (Wierenga, Edward R., 1989); (Hoffman, Joshua, and Gary S. Rosenkrantz, 2002) holds that God can do anything logically possible. But interaction with the physical world appears to require physical contact: the burning bush burns, the pillar of fire heats, the Red Sea parts, the dust-written word is written *in dust*, the fish is broken and eaten. Drawing in particular requires a substrate, a hand or hand-analogue, and a temporal stroke. Can a non-physical being draw at all? The doctrine of incorporeality says no. The text says yes. Tradition's reply (that these are instrumental acts mediated through created causes) concedes that *God does not himself interact physically*; he occasions physical events from outside the physical, which is not the picture the texts present.

**Q7.** *How can petitionary prayer be efficacious — God's act depending on the petition — when immutability and timelessness forbid that dependence?* The tradition (Stump, Eleonore, 1979); (Michael J. Murray and Kurt Meyers, 1994); (Scott A. Davison, 2017) treats petitionary prayer as efficacious: God answers, sometimes by granting, sometimes by withholding, in a way that depends on the petition having been made. But efficacy requires that God's act be contingent on the creature's act, which immutability denies; and the contingency must be temporally located, which timelessness denies. The doctrine of efficacious prayer is functionally interactionist while the metaphysical doctrines forbid the interactionism that would underwrite it.

**Q8.** *How can the incarnation, the paradigm of interaction, be the act of a God who as God does not interact, the deepest form of the problem?* The two-natures doctrine (John Hick (ed.), 1977); (Thomas V. Morris, 1986); (Oliver D. Crisp, 2007); (Timothy Pawl, 2016); (Timothy Pawl, 2019) holds that the Logos took on a complete human nature without ceasing to be God. But the human nature interacts — eats, sleeps, tires, weeps, dies — and the divine nature does not. Either the interactions of Jesus' human nature are interactions of God (in which case God interacts, and the doctrines of impassibility and immutability fail at the deepest possible level: at the very being of the Word) or they are not interactions of God (in which case the incarnation is a juxtaposition of two beings rather than a single subject, and Chalcedon fails). The tradition wants both: God interacts as the man Jesus *and* God does not interact as God. It is at the incarnation, more than at any other point, that the doctrinal structure and the narrative structure of interaction cease to be reconcilable.

*What is required.* Eight pressures, taken together, surface what *interact* depends on when the term is examined against the conditions of its application. The doctrines of timelessness, immutability, impassibility, and simplicity, taken together, leave no room for *inter* (for between, mutual, sequenced, contingent driving) on the divine side of the encounter. Each pressure names a feature constitutive of interaction (sequence, responsiveness, persistent relata, affective tracking, mind-change, physical contact, contingent efficacy, incarnational unity-of-subject) and at each point the tradition saves the doctrine by relocating the feature entirely to the creature. But interaction is precisely the predicate that requires the feature on *both* sides: one-sided sequence is not sequence, one-sided responsiveness is not responsiveness, one-sided contact is not contact. This is the precise respect in which interaction differs from the asymmetric relations the tradition is content to grant God. A ground can stand wholly outside what it grounds (Aquinas's pure asymmetry, the creature really related and God only logically related, is built for exactly that) but interaction is the one relation that cannot be run from outside: to drive *between* two relata is to stand among them, within the conditions across which the driving passes. The very asymmetry that leaves grounding intact is what disqualifies interaction: a subject withheld from T, S, and Φ may be called the ground of what bears them, but cannot be one of the relata between which the action runs. Each of the eight features runs on the same structural conditions. Sequence and mind-change require a transition between before and after (T); persistent relata and physical contact require an interval across which the parties stand distinct and meet (S); responsiveness, affective tracking, contingent efficacy, and incarnational unity-of-subject require a substantial bearer in whom the engagement registers and is sustained (Φ). What the doctrine relocates to the creature is not an incidental residue but the whole modal structure interaction runs on. The Modal Convergence Theorem and the Subsistence definition (developed in Chapter 8) supply the technical equipment for relocating that structure as a modal-structural property Nature bears in property mode, rather than as the action of a being upon Nature. What *interaction* names, when its referent is examined, is the bilateral driving Nature carries on between its own constituents (process engaging process, system responding to system, history bearing the marks of mutual constraint all the way down) within the conditions T, S, and Φ supply. The addressed, affective character the narratives carry (grief, anger, relenting, encounter rather than mere causal traffic) is not subtracted in the relocation but routed to where it is derived rather than presupposed: the first-person register of a self-modeling life within Nature (Chapter 7), under which subject-on-subject maintenance reads as benevolence and address ([§6.9.1](<6.9.1 Benevolence.md>)). The same cluster the chapter has met at every attribute reappears: the feature the doctrine cannot seat in God is the feature Nature bears at every level.

One rival to this relocation must be met before the inversion is secured, because it grants the eight pressures and halts one step short of the conclusion. Divine temporalism, in both its bare and its open-theist forms (Nicholas Wolterstorff, 1975); (William Hasker, 1989); (Mullins, R. T., 2016); (Clark H. Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker and David Basinger, 1994); (John Sanders, 1998); (Gregory A. Boyd, 2001), concedes that the timeless, immutable, impassible God cannot bear the *inter* of interaction and repairs the doctrine not by relocating interaction away from God but by putting God in time: a personal agent with genuine before-and-after in the divine life itself, who responds, relents, and is really related to what creatures do. The repair reaches this section's destructive result and stops at its constructive one, and that step is where the disagreement turns. To restore interaction the temporalist must grant that the interacting subject bears succession in its own being: before and after in God, not merely in the creature. But succession borne by the agent is T borne by the agent; the responsiveness so recovered still requires the interval across which the parties stand and meet (S) and the substantial bearer in whom the engagement registers and is sustained (Φ). The temporalist has not found an interacting subject outside the conditions; he has moved the subject inside them and kept the name. And a subject that takes on T, S, and Φ in order to interact is, by [§6.3.1](<6.3.1 Necessity.md>), no longer a candidate for the modal status the doctrine reserved for God: necessity is the modal status of the modal structure T∧S∧Φ and does not transfer to a being that bears the modal structure's conditions (modal invariance, §[§2.1.4](<2.1.4 Modal Stability.md>)–2.1.5; the transfer result, [§6.3.1](<6.3.1 Necessity.md>)). Such a subject is a denizen of the conditions Nature supplies, however exalted, not the ground beyond them, and the ground it was meant to be is necessary, hence uncreated, so there is no act of creating or altering it left for any agent, temporal or timeless, to perform. Re-timing is therefore not an alternative to the relocation; it is the relocation, carried halfway and halted at the word *God*. What survives the repair is not a rival to the inversion but a residual question internal to it (whether the bearer of T, S, and Φ is a person or Nature) and that question is taken up where personhood and address are derived rather than presupposed (Chapter 7), not by stationing a personal agent at the threshold. The single remaining foothold, that divine "metaphysical time" is mere topological succession rather than the metric time Nature instantiates (Alan G. Padgett, 1992); cf. Swinburne on topological and metric time, collapses into the same fork: any succession thick enough to constitute the divine person's responding *after* the creature acts is T enough to count among the frame's conditions, and any "time" too thin to be that is too thin to host the genuine response the repair was introduced to secure.

*What is inverted.* Interaction belongs to Nature. The Latin *interagere* is built from *inter* (between) and *agere* (to drive, to act, to do); the predicate names a mutual driving, a between-ness that requires both sides to bear the action. The Greek ἐνεργέω (*energeō*), to work upon, to be active in, preserves the same shape: ἐν (in) + ἔργον (work), an in-working that lodges in the medium it touches. Hebrew has no single verb for *interact*; the relational structure is carried by *‘āsāh* (to do, to make) governed by *‘im* (with), *‘āsāh ‘im*, God *does-with* his people. In each tradition the predicate is bilateral at its root: between-driving, in-working, with-doing, and the bilaterality requires Nature: two relata sharing T, S, and Φ in the structural sense that lets the action run both ways. The doctrinal package built around timelessness, immutability, impassibility, and simplicity strips precisely the bilaterality the etymology preserves: what remains is unilateral action from a side that cannot itself be moved or moved-toward: action without between, work without in-, doing without with-. Nature bears interaction (bilaterally, sequentially, contactfully, mind-changeably) at every level at which the doctrines forbid God to bear it. The structural inversion is this: the predicated subject cannot be moved or moved-toward, and so cannot bear the very between-driving its predicate requires: the being whose interactivity the tradition was meant to underwrite turns out, on its own doctrinal terms, to be the one being in the system that cannot interact. What *God interacts* names, once the classical predicate is examined for what its application takes, is the bilateral driving Nature carries on within itself, between constituents that share its conditions. The doctrine of divine interaction, however formulated, locates that mutual driving in a subject beyond Nature rather than in Nature itself.


---

← [6.7.2 Causality](<6.7.2 Causality.md>) | [6.7.4 Sovereignty](<6.7.4 Sovereignty.md>) →
