When God Repents - The BAS Library
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When God Repents

God’s repentance is not only an expression of divine freedom, but also of divine compassion.

By Bernhard W. Anderson

Now and then in the Bible, God “repents.” In the Jonah story, for instance, we read that when God saw how the people of Nineveh had turned from their evil ways, God “repented” (KJV) of the calamity he had planned to bring on them (Jonah 3:10). This curious theological statement leads to the larger question of God’s sovereignty and human freedom. In creating humankind in the divine image, with an independent will and freedom like God’s own creative freedom, God risked the potential chaos that results from human violence evident in wars, exploitation, environmental ruin and other forms of […]

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Footnotes

1.

Here, I resume the discussion of “The Persistence of Chaos in God’s Creation”; see BR, February 1996. At points this discussion overlaps with my essay, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: The Sovereignty of God in the Bible,” Theology Today, April 1996, pp. 1–11.

Endnotes

1.

God’s openness to the future, as shown in intercessory prayers, is discussed perceptively by Patrick D. Miller in They Cried unto the Lord: The Form and Theology of Biblical Prayer (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), chapter 8. See also David Noel Freedman, “Other Than Moses…Who Asks (or Tells) God to Repent?” BR, Winter 1985.

2.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets, 2 vols. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962).

3.

David R. Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), p. 16.