Can God change his mind? If not, what is the sense in praying to him? If he is really immutable, does that not imply that he is inexorable, ruthless and uncaring like a blind cosmic force? And in that case, can we plausibly be expected to love him or to believe in his love for us? This is a perennial problem, expressed for instance in Morris West’s impressive novel, The Clowns of God, by the abdicated pope Gregory XVII: ‘Our Jesus who was of the seed of Abraham said that whatever we ask will be given us. We should knock at the door and clamour to be heard. But there’s no point in that if there’s no one inside—or if the one inside is a mad spirit whirling heedless with the galaxies!’

Here, on the face of it, there is a stark and hopeless conflict between devotional expectations and the postulates of classical theology. How can the eager Christian heart, yearning for a personal friendship with God, inspired by the biblical imagery of God’s love-affair with his people, cope with a God who is changeless, unresponsive, atemporal, impassible?

Problems like this can be felt very deeply, and indeed it seems that this particular problem has been so deeply and generally felt that it is now widely assumed that it is religiously impossible to believe in the kind of God proposed to us by classical theology. It may therefore seem rather indelicate and perhaps impertinent to suggest that, after all, it is a false problem.