The "Eternal Creator," and the issue of necessity and contingency

Third, the older tradition taught that creation is an external act of God that produces a temporal effect. God's act of creating is eternal. The thing created is temporal. ... The divine act of creation is nothing other than the eternal action of God's immutable will. Thus, there is no distinction in agency between God's will to create and the act of creating (see Rev. 4:11). They are the same act in God. (James E. Dolezal, All that is in God, 100)

One particularly disturbing error in Dolezal's attempted defense of classical theism is his claim that God is the eternal Creator. We note here that when Dolezal claims God is the eternal Creator, he is not claiming that creation is eternal, or that God's act to create is eternal, only that the the decree to create is eternal. In other words, in all fairness to Dolezal, he is not claiming that creation partakes of eternity in any way. The act of creation lies outside of God, and it is something God does in time.

Dolezal's assertion of God as the eternal Creator is a reaction against the view of theistic mutualism, most clearly in its statement that God "takes on temporal properties" (K. Scott Oliphant, God with Us, cited in Dolezal, 95) when He created the world. We must therefore understand Dolezal to mean that God was always the Creator in the sense that God does not change when He creates the world, and does not take on additional (temporal) properties in doing so. The creatorhood of God is always present, and therefore God does not take on additional properties in order to create the world.

Without actually reading what Oliphant has said, the idea that God must take on temporal properties in order to create strikes me as errant. At the same time, Dolezal's swing to claiming that God is eternally the Creator provokes a different sort of questions and veers towards a different sort of error. Since Creation is separate of God the Creator, the idea that "creatorhood" is eternal seems to be a claim that the act of creating is necessary to God. For if God does not initiate the act of creating (as opposed to producing the fact of creation), then how can it be said that God is the Eternal Creator? But if the act of creating is necessary to God, then Creation, the product, is necessary, not contingent. Is Dolezal seriously arguing that creation is necessary to God?

We can extrapolate that also to God as Redeemer. Does God have to save anyone, for a redeemer who does not redeem anyone cannot be called a redeemer? So is redemption therefore necessary to the being of God? If God is the Justifier who has decreed to justify the elect from eternity, is justification necessary to the being of God? Is God the eternal justifier, the eternal redeemer? For surely Christ is the lamb slain from before the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8 alternate)!

I do not believe Dolezal has actually thought through the implications of what he is saying. Instead, he is relying on a flawed metaphysics and a flawed view of time, in his reaction against theological mutualism. But just because mutualism as it is presented is wrong, it does not mean that classical theism as mediated by Dolezal is right. Claiming that God is "Eternal Creator" may seem to resolve the problem of God's relation to Creation, but it creates a whole different set of problems with regards to the nature of God in making the opera ad extra indicative of the ens ad intra, making what should be things contingent into things necessary.