Mindtrap’s argument (in brief) runs like this:

1. God’s aseity means none of God’s knowledge “comes from” creatures (or from any “logical implication” involving creatures).
2. God’s knowledge of you is the “idea of you.”
3. All contingent details about you (desires, actions, etc.) are “defined within God.”
4. So God’s “idea of you” is equivalent to your entire life-history.
5. Therefore, if you were different, God would be different.
6. But God cannot be different.
7. Therefore you (and your actions) are necessary, not contingent.

That’s the intended squeeze: immutability + exhaustive divine knowledge allegedly forces modal collapse (everything becomes necessary).

Mindtrap’s aim is to deny that God genuinely has two alternatives—create or refrain from creating—by arguing that if God eternally has the “idea of you,” then you (and your acts) must be necessary. But that’s a modal-collapse argument, and it doesn’t land on my view. On a Neo-Reformed account, modal categories are not an external realm constraining God; they are grounded in God’s power and nature. So “possibility space” can’t function as an extrinsic principle that forces God’s hand.

Even granting his setup, he still confuses kinds of necessity. The necessity of God’s self-knowledge and the immutability of God’s act of knowing do not entail the absolute necessity of the creature as object known. At most you get conditional certainty: given God’s free decree to create, the created history is fixed. That is necessity of the consequence, not necessity of the consequent.

Finally, his framing smuggles in a creaturely model of “ideas” as if there were a created object sitting there to be contemplated. But on the Neo-Calvinist account, God’s “free knowledge” is knowledge of the world as decreed, and God “takes on” creatorship and related predicates covenantally—i.e., by entering a new Creator–creature relation through creation—without intrinsic change in God.

There’s another sense in which something can be “necessary” without posing any threat to divine freedom or aseity: necessity by nature (or “accidental” necessity relative to God’s character). Even Mindtrap effectively grants this in ethics.

Mindtrap agrees that moral truths aren’t grounded in an independent realm of abstracta. They reflect God’s nature. That means: given who God is, certain moral states of affairs are not genuinely possible. God cannot make “baby-rape for pleasure” good, because that would contradict His holiness. Most Christians agree with this because they reject moral Platonism and locate moral necessity in God Himself.

But that concession matters: it shows there is a kind of necessity that is not an extrinsic constraint on God at all. It is not “a law above God.” It is simply God being God.

So Mindtrap can’t treat all necessity-language as if it automatically implies a modal collapse or a limitation on divine freedom. He already recognizes a class of necessities—moral necessities—that arise from God’s nature.

Now here’s the rub: on my view, I’m not saying creation is necessary. I’m saying that if God freely wills to create, His act will necessarily express His nature and purposes. That is exactly parallel to the moral case: if God creates, He will not create a world that renders evil as good, because creation must reflect His holy character.

And once that’s granted, the question becomes one of scope, not kind. Mindtrap must explain why moral truths can be “necessary by nature” without threatening God, while insisting that other truths cannot be necessary in that same derivative sense. If moral reality is downstream from God’s nature, then at minimum it’s coherent to say that other features of reality may also be fixed by God’s nature and ends—without implying that God is constrained by something outside Himself or that creation is metaphysically necessary.

Mindtrap is actually borrowing a premise from my side, but then weaponizing it for a modal-collapse conclusion. The premise is this: creation is revelatory. The facts of the world are not religiously neutral; they function as a disclosure of God’s character and lordship (Romans 1). In that sense, reality is “theater” for God’s glory—His artwork, His self-manifestation in creaturely form.

So if you radically alter the facts, you don’t merely get a different aesthetic arrangement; you get a different revelatory pattern. And because the world’s meaning is bound up with what it shows about God, a sufficiently different order would disclose a different “god”—not because God’s essence is changed by creatures, but because the world would now be “saying” something different about who God is.

This needs one key clarification: I am claiming that any difference in any fact would imply a difference in what creation reveals about God—but not arbitrarily. The reason is that the created order is not a heap of independent details. It is a unified, purposive act of divine self-disclosure. God’s creation, taken as a whole, is a coherent revelation of His nature, wisdom, holiness, and lordship (Rom 1). If even one fact were different, then the revelatory pattern would be different, because the “whole painting” is composed precisely of these facts and no others.

So the argument is not the crude slogan “if the world were different, God would be different” as though God were intrinsically altered by creatures. God cannot be intrinsically different. Rather, the claim is that a different totality of facts would constitute a different communicative act—a different artwork, and therefore a different disclosure of the Author. Since the world’s facts are the very medium through which God reveals Himself, to change the facts is to change what is being revealed.

Creation is God’s work, God’s ordering, God’s canvas. To encounter creation is to encounter a painting whose every stroke is intentionally placed to force recognition of the Painter. Alter the stroke, and you have altered the painting—hence altered the disclosure—because the painting just is the sum-total of its determinate strokes.

That is exactly why Mindtrap himself grants moral constraints: if God created a world where evil was good (e.g., “baby-rape is virtuous”), that world would be presenting a different god. So he already admits the general principle that the world’s structure is tethered to God’s nature. The real dispute is the scope of that tether: whether it governs only morality, or whether God’s ends and self-revelation can also uniquely fix wider features of the created order—without implying that God is metaphysically forced to create at all.

Neo-Calvinism

This is exactly where Mindtrap’s modal-collapse argument overreaches. From the fact that God’s act is simple and unchanging, he treats the relational content of that act as if it were an intrinsic feature of God’s essence. But “Creator” and “knower-of-this-world” are covenantal-relational predicates, not pieces of God. They become true by the one free divine act ad extra, without making creation necessary or making God dependent on a prior realm of possibilities.

God’s decree is the one eternal, undivided act by which He freely wills creation and all its history; it is not a temporal plan, but the very ground of every fact. Foreknowledge is not God looking forward in time, nor God reacting to a pre-existing realm of possibilities, but God knowing the world as the determinate content of His free decree. In creating, God “takes on” creatorship and “knower-of-this-world” covenantally—by establishing real relations to creatures—without any intrinsic change or dependence in Himself. Jimmy has captured this well: God does not build the throne and later sit; His creating is already His sitting—His condescension, His lordship, and His knowledge of all that He brings to be. God’s willing-to-create is already God’s lordship-over-creation. He doesn’t first make a world and later decide how to relate to it; the act of creating includes the act of covenantal dominion and condescension.

God has, by nature, a full and sufficient a se knowledge of Himself—archetypal, underived, needing no world as its condition. And yet God also has “free knowledge”: not as an acquired update, and not as a second reservoir of information alongside His essence, but as the knowledge of a world as decreed. This is the knowledge God “takes on” in creating—not by becoming more informed or more complete, but by freely establishing a determinate object outside Himself and thus a real Creator–creature relation.

The decree and this free knowledge are inseparable: God knows what He wills, and He wills what He knows, in one eternal act—so that the world is wholly grounded in God, while God remains wholly a se. And precisely because the decree is the ground of every fact, God’s free knowledge is exhaustive: nothing in creation is “left over” as an independent remainder that would have to be learned from the world or supplied by creaturely co-authorship.

But it’s crucial to locate this free knowledge correctly. It is not ad intra as though the creaturely content were an intrinsic constituent of God’s essence. If the world were inside God in that way—if the creaturely object were a piece of the divine life—then Mindtrap’s slide would have teeth, because differences in the world would imply intrinsic differences in God. Instead, the Neo-Calvinist claim is that God’s act is eternal and simple, yet His relations are real and contingent: the world is the object of God’s free knowledge because God freely decrees it, not because God is metaphysically composed of it.

Objection: God determined it to be undetermined

Mindtrap might push back and ask: “If God can do all this, why couldn’t God also speak into reality a plan with variance—i.e., a decree that intentionally contains some underdetermined elements?”

Reply: you’re confusing two kinds of indeterminacy

There are two very different senses of “indeterminacy”:

1. Indeterminacy of incompleteness (a gap because the author didn’t specify).
2. Indeterminacy of permission (a real allowance for another source of determination).

A finite author can have (1) all the time: Tolkien doesn’t specify how many hairs are on Frodo’s head, because Tolkien’s concept is incomplete. That “indeterminacy” is just a limitation of the author. But God cannot have indeterminacy of incompleteness. A God who leaves reality underdescribed because He cannot exhaustively determine it is not omniscient and not sovereign; reality would contain an independent remainder not grounded in Him.

So if Mindtrap means (1)—“God leaves some things unspecified”—that doesn’t apply to God.

What Mindtrap has in mind is (2): God positively wills a reality in which certain outcomes are not determined by Him but are determined from within the story by creaturely spontaneity or libertarian self-origination. But this is where the cost shows up.

A decree with “variance” implies a second source of ultimacy

If something is genuinely underdetermined by God’s decree, then whatever finally determines it is doing metaphysical work that God is not doing. It becomes a co-explanatory terminus. And at that point you no longer have the Neo-Calvinist asymmetry (“all facts are grounded in God, none ground God”). You’ve introduced a pocket of reality whose final explanation is not God’s will.

You can dress that up as “permission,” “variance,” or “freedom,” but metaphysically it amounts to this: some facts would be what they are without being grounded in the divine act. That’s exactly the “leftover remainder” the Neo-Calvinist account denies.

“But God could decree that creatures self-determine those facts”

Even if you say God decrees the power of libertarian self-determination, you haven’t escaped the issue. The question isn’t whether God can decree that creatures act; it’s whether the creaturely acts are fully grounded in God as their ultimate explanatory source. If the creature is determining something in a way that is not itself determined—if the creature is the ultimate originator of that fact—then the story has a second “authorial” wellspring.

None of this denies that God ordains genuine creaturely agency, deliberation, means-end reasoning, responsibility, and secondary causes. The Neo-Calvinist claim is simply that God’s decree does not leave ontological “white space” in reality—no ungrounded facts that must be supplied by something other than God’s comprehensive act.

So yes: God can decree a world where creatures really choose. But no: God cannot decree a world where some facts are finally ungrounded in Him without abandoning the very asymmetry that preserves aseity.

Objection: Free Knowledge & Aseity

Mindtrap may try to dodge the force of the argument by saying: “Fine—God’s free knowledge doesn’t have to be a se, because it isn’t part of God’s essence. It’s ad extra. So it can be contingent without threatening divine ultimacy.” That sounds plausible until you notice the equivocation. There is a difference between saying free knowledge is non-essential in object and saying it is non–a se in source. The first is true and harmless: God’s knowledge of this world presupposes a world, and since God need not create, there need not be a world to be known. But the second is fatal. If free knowledge is “not a se” in the sense that its content is supplied from outside God, then God becomes epistemically downstream of creation—receiving specification from what He made.

So the question is simple: if God’s free knowledge is not a se, from where does it come? If Mindtrap answers, “from the world,” then God is informed by the world. The creature becomes explanatorily prior to at least one divine cognitive determination. You can call it “ad extra,” you can call it “relational,” you can call it “non-essential,” but you cannot deny what it is: a genuine dependence of God on creation in the order of knowing. And once God’s knowledge is conditionable in that way, you have conceded the very vulnerability your view wanted to avoid—God is now the kind of being whose cognition can be governed by something outside Himself.

If, on the other hand, Mindtrap answers, “free knowledge is from God,” then he has conceded the Neo-Reformed point. Free knowledge is contingent in object but a se in source: it is grounded in God’s own eternal act, not derived from a pre-existing world or a pre-existing realm of modal truths. God knows the world because God decrees it—He does not decree after consulting it, and He does not know it by receiving its data. In that case “free knowledge need not be a se” is just a verbal trick: it’s true only if “not a se” means “not essential as a relational predicate,” but false if it means “not grounded in God alone.”

In other words, Mindtrap’s move either collapses into open-theist-style dependence (“God learns the world from the world”), or it collapses into our position (“God’s free knowledge is grounded in His decree”). There is no stable middle position where free knowledge is genuinely non–a se and yet God remains the ultimate, underived knower. Either the world contributes to what God knows (and God is no longer epistemically ultimate), or God alone grounds what He knows (and then free knowledge is a se in the only sense that matters).

To be fair, Mindtrap is an Open Theist, so he is not trying to preserve the Neo-Reformed asymmetry at all costs. In his framework, it is perfectly acceptable to say that God’s knowledge of the contingent order is not a se—not grounded wholly in God—but in some sense arises “with” creation and tracks it as it unfolds. So when he says, “free knowledge need not be a se because it isn’t part of God’s essence,” that isn’t merely an ad hoc escape hatch; it fits his larger commitment to an open future and to divine–creature reciprocity. But that also clarifies the price tag: openness is purchased by making God’s cognitive relation to the world partly receptive rather than purely decretal.

And this is where the tension sharpens. On the Neo-Reformed account, the decree is the ground of every creaturely fact; therefore free knowledge is exhaustive of the entire created order because its object is whatever God wills to exist. Open theism, by contrast, must deny that exhaustiveness at precisely the point that matters: some future creaturely facts are not yet determinate and therefore not yet knowable as definite truths. But if the object of God’s decree is “all of creation and its history,” then either (a) the decree is not actually exhaustive of creaturely history, or (b) God’s free knowledge is not “knowledge of the world as decreed,” but an ongoing reception of creaturely novelty. Either way, the open-theist escape does not undermine the Neo-Reformed reply; it simply confirms the fork in the road.

That is why the move does not actually refute the Neo-Reformed position; it just shifts to a different model. Either free knowledge is grounded in God’s decree (and then Mindtrap’s modal-collapse argument loses its target, because the contingent object does not become an intrinsic constituent of God), or free knowledge is grounded in the world (and then you have embraced a framework in which God is epistemically downstream of creation). The open theist can choose the second horn—but then he cannot simultaneously deploy “aseity” and “immutability” rhetoric as if the disagreement were mere conceptual bookkeeping. He has paid for openness with a real metaphysical concession: the world conditions God’s knowledge, and therefore God is not the final explanatory terminus for the world in the order of knowing.

So the upshot is simple: Mindtrap’s objection only “works” if he is willing to relinquish the very asymmetry that motivates the Neo-Reformed position—namely, that God’s knowledge and decree are underived, and that creation is wholly grounded in God rather than co-grounding God. But once that asymmetry is surrendered, the modal-collapse charge is no longer a criticism of Neo-Calvinism so much as a declaration of methodological difference: open theism avoids determinacy by making God’s relation to the world partly receptive. And that is exactly the point at issue.

The complication, however, is that Mindtrap also wants to retain aseity-talk. He doesn’t want to say God is dependent in any deep sense; he wants to say God remains ultimate—the metaphysical source, the One “from Himself”—even if God’s knowledge of the world is partly receptive. But this is exactly where the position becomes unstable. You cannot keep the word “aseity” while redefining the direction of explanation so that creation supplies determinate content to God’s cognition. Aseity is not merely the claim “God exists without a cause.” It is the claim that God is not conditioned, completed, or specified by what is not God—especially in those respects that would make Him epistemically downstream of His own creation.

Put differently: Mindtrap’s model wants a one-way asymmetry in ontology (God gives being to the world) while allowing a two-way reciprocity in epistemology (the world gives determinate content back to God). But once the world contributes to what God knows as determinate, it is no longer merely an object before a sovereign knower; it becomes a partial source of God’s cognitive state. That is a real dependence relation. Calling it “ad extra” does not remove the metaphysical point: God’s knowledge, with respect to creation, is being specified by creation. And a God who is specified by creation is not a se in the relevant sense, because something outside Him is explanatory-prior to at least one feature of His life.

This is why the open-theist maneuver cannot be presented as a harmless technicality—“free knowledge isn’t essential, so it need not be a se.” If “not a se” means “not essential,” fine: it is trivially true that knowing-this-world presupposes a world. But if “not a se” means “not grounded in God alone,” then it collides with aseity. You can have an open future by making God’s relation to the world partly receptive, but you cannot do that and then still wield aseity as though nothing about God is being conditioned from the outside. That is the cost of the system, and it is precisely the cost the Neo-Reformed view refuses to pay.

In short, Mindtrap can either (1) preserve aseity by grounding God’s free knowledge wholly in decree (and then his modal-collapse argument misses), or (2) preserve openness by making God’s free knowledge partly world-supplied (and then aseity is no longer doing the work he wants it to do). He can choose either horn—but he can’t have both.

The problem becomes massive once you deny God’s completeness. If God is not complete independently of creation, then creation is not a free act but something God always needed—meaning God is dependent on the world to be who He is. And if God is a se but can “give it up,” then what is essential to God becomes negotiable: God could will His own qualities to be different. In that case, we cannot truly know God, because the object of our knowledge is no longer stable—either God can alter Himself, or He was never the living God in the first place, since He relied on the world all along. Either way, the Open Theist model collapses: it preserves creaturely indeterminacy only by sacrificing divine aseity and the intelligibility of God’s revelation.

Objection: “God has essential and non-essential qualities; aseity could be non-essential.”

Someone might try to blunt the argument by saying: Sure, God can change in some respects, but not in His essence. God has essential attributes and non-essential attributes. So even if aseity (or immutability) were surrendered, God could still retain the essential core.

Reply 1: If aseity is “non-essential,” you’ve changed the subject from God to a creature

Aseity isn’t a detachable “feature” God might have or not have like a hairstyle or a contingent role. Aseity is what it means for God to be God in the first place: to be from Himself, dependent on nothing, not conditioned by anything outside Himself.

If you say aseity is not essential, then you are saying it is possible for “God” to:

• derive being from something else,
• be conditioned by the world,
• need creation to be complete.

If God can lack aseity (or can “give it up”), the problem isn’t mainly that he’s not “classical.” The problem is that he’s no longer ultimate. He becomes one more agent inside a wider framework—someone who participates in reality rather than being the ontological source of it.

And once God is no longer ultimate, two things follow.

1) God becomes a “player” under rules, not the author of the rules

If God’s identity and perfection can be conditioned by creation—whether by needing creation to be complete, or by being able to shed self-sufficiency—then there are constraints or “rules of the game” that govern what God can be.

Even if you say God entered that game voluntarily, the moment God is in it, he is now a being who can be:

• limited by factors outside himself,
• affected by relations he doesn’t exhaustively control,
• altered in ways that are not simply the outworking of his own perfection.

That’s exactly what it means to deny ultimacy: God is no longer the final explanatory terminus.

2) If God is conditionable, he can be defective—and then moral knowledge collapses

The deeper issue is epistemic and moral: a conditionable God cannot ground stable normativity.

Why? Because moral knowledge requires a final, non-derivative standard. If God can be “made” one way rather than another by the world, then morality becomes hostage to whatever conditions shape God.

You get a dilemma:

• Either God is conditioned by the universe (even partly), in which case the universe is upstream of God and can in principle generate a God who is morally defective, conflicted, or unstable.
• Or God is not conditioned by the universe, in which case you’ve reintroduced precisely the kind of aseity/ultimacy that open theism tends to resist when it threatens their “openness” thesis.

So the point isn’t “you’re not classical.” The point is: you’ve lost a God who is reliable as the final source of moral truth, because you’ve made God metaphysically vulnerable to the very world whose morality he is supposed to define.

Moral knowledge is only one example. The deeper issue is: if creation can condition God, then God becomes a being who can be cognitively affected by defects in the created order. And once that’s on the table, everything downstream collapses: revelation, providence, promise, judgment, salvation.

If the universe is “upstream” of God in any relevant sense—if its structures, conditions, or “rules of the game” can determine what God is like or how God functions—then it becomes coherent to say:

• God can be made subject to limitations he did not author,
• God can be made subject to constraints that can distort,
• God can be made subject to the “defective” features of a fallen or contingent order.

At that point, God is no longer the final explanatory terminus. He’s a participant inside an environment that can act on him.

Either:

(1) God is not governed by creation

Then God is the ultimate ground; he is not subject to the world’s conditions; his knowledge and character are inviolable. But then the open-theist move (“God is in some way conditioned by creaturely novelty or an open future”) loses its intended metaphysical leverage. You’ve basically returned to the kind of God who can secure exhaustive providence and infallible self-consistency.

Or:

(2) God is governed by creation (even in principle)

Then God is epistemically defeasible: he could be constrained, altered, or impaired by the conditions he is in. Once you accept the type of dependence, you can’t rule out the modes of dependence without smuggling in the very inviolability you just denied. And then:

• revelation becomes non-guaranteed,
• promises become precarious,
• moral norms become contingent,
• God’s own self-interpretation becomes suspect.

A governed God cannot function as the final authority because he is no longer the final reality.

3) “But God chose to be in the game”

This doesn’t fix it. Voluntary entry still yields the same consequence:

• If God can voluntarily make himself conditionable, then God’s identity is negotiable.
• And if God’s identity is negotiable, then there is no principled reason why God’s moral character is not also negotiable in the relevant sense.

A God who can place himself under conditions that might deform or revise him is not a secure foundation for “God is good” in the strong, norm-setting sense. At best, you get “God is good given the current cosmic arrangement,” which is not the sort of goodness that can function as the ultimate standard.

So the objection only works by quietly redefining God.

Reply 2: How would you even know aseity is non-essential?

This objection collapses epistemically. If aseity and immutability are not essential, then God could shed them. But then:

• On what basis do you identify which attributes are essential and which are not?
• What rule do you use that isn’t just: “the ones I need to preserve my model are essential”?

If the answer is “Scripture tells us,” that’s fine—but then Scripture’s testimony is functioning precisely because God’s identity is stable and reliable. If God can surrender aseity, you’ve destabilized the very thing you’re appealing to. You can’t say, “God reveals Himself faithfully,” while also saying, “God might not be the same kind of being tomorrow.” A God who can revise His own nature undermines the intelligibility of divine self-disclosure, because the object of revelation is no longer fixed.

And notice what happens if you try to escape that by saying, “Well, God only changes in non-essential ways.” That just reintroduces the same problem at a deeper level: how do you know which ways are non-essential? If your answer is not grounded in revelation but in a philosophical need to keep open theism afloat, then it’s arbitrary. If your answer is grounded in revelation, then you’ve conceded that revelation is the norm—and the open theist must show that revelation actually teaches this alleged shedding of aseity.

But Scripture doesn’t teach that God “gave up” aseity. It never presents God as once self-sufficient and then later becoming dependent on the world, or as voluntarily placing Himself under conditions that could metaphysically govern Him. The Bible’s Creator–creature distinction runs the other direction: God is the One “from whom and through whom and to whom are all things,” not the One whose being is supplemented or conditioned by what He makes. So the burden of proof is squarely on the open theist: if you’re going to claim God can relinquish aseity, you need justification (while requiring to be false).

If aseity is a property God can relinquish, then it isn’t fixed by God’s nature. But if it isn’t fixed by God’s nature, what principled constraint prevents God from relinquishing it again—or “reacquiring” it—in different circumstances? On your own terms, you’ve made God’s identity modifiable, and that undermines our ability to treat divine self-revelation as disclosing a stable referent.

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Objection: “Okay, but God’s qualities aren’t ‘a se.’ God is.”

Good—this objection is actually closer to the truth. But it exposes another dilemma.

Reply 3: Either God’s attributes are grounded in God, or they float free

When you ask, “Are God’s qualities a se?” you’re circling a real issue:

• If God’s attributes are independent of God (existing “on their own”), then you’ve introduced a realm of realities God depends on—call it properties, forms, standards, essences, whatever. That compromises aseity because God is now conditioned by something not-God.
• If God’s attributes are not independent but are grounded in God, then God cannot “give them up” at will, because they are not detachable accessories. They are who God is.

So you get a dilemma:

1. Attributes independent of God → God is not truly a se (He depends on a property-realm).
2. Attributes identical with / grounded in God → God cannot discard them without ceasing to be God.

Either way, the move “aseity is non-essential” doesn’t help.

Objection: Grounding Doesn’t Require Identity

You may grant that God’s attributes are grounded in God without granting that they are identical to God. But notice what that buys you with respect to aseity: it makes aseity either necessary or contingent, and either way the open-theist “God can give it up” move collapses.

First, if aseity is grounded in God yet not identical with God, then on your model God is a se only by exemplifying aseity. But that already generates a fatal tension: nothing that is a se can be a se only contingently. Aseity is not the kind of feature that can be “sometimes on, sometimes off” while the subject remains ultimate. If God can be a se in one state and not a se in another, then aseity is no longer constitutive of deity—it becomes a revisable predicate, a status God can take up and lay down.

But a “contingently a se” deity is a contradiction in terms. Aseity is not merely necessary existence; it is non-derivative existence—being from oneself, dependent on nothing, conditioned by nothing. That makes aseity stronger than bare modal necessity: it excludes the very idea that God’s being or God’s identity could hinge on any further factor, whether an external condition, a divine choice to “enter” a mode, or a relation to creation. The moment aseity is treated as optional—something God can possess in one configuration and lack in another—you have introduced dependence at the deepest level. God’s ultimacy would now be contingent upon conditions (or decisions) by which He becomes ultimate, which is just to say: He is not ultimate at all.

This yields a dilemma:

(A) Attributes necessarily grounded

If aseity is necessarily grounded in God, then it is not an optional add-on. Even if you deny strict identity, aseity remains a fixed expression of God’s nature. God cannot “give it up” without ceasing to be the kind of being He is. So the open-theist escape hatch fails: you’ve preserved a stable God, but you’ve lost the claim that aseity is negotiable.

(B) Attributes contingently grounded

If aseity is contingently grounded in God, then God can constitute Himself with or without it. But now God’s nature is revisionary: God can be one kind of being at one time (a se) and a different kind of being at another (not a se), depending on what He chooses to ground in Himself. At that point:

• God is no longer ultimate (He becomes conditionable—even if “self-conditionable”),
• revelation no longer secures a stable referent (the “God” revealed need not be the same kind of being tomorrow),
• and normativity collapses, because the standard can be reconstituted.

So “grounded but not identical” yields only two coherent options: either God’s grounded attributes are necessary (and thus not relinquishable), or they are contingent (and thus God becomes defeasible and unreliable as the ultimate ground).

Finally, there is a deeper metaphysical pressure here. God must either be what He is like, or else depend on what He is like. Ask the simple question: does God necessarily exemplify His attributes?

• If yes, then you need an explanation of why that exemplification is necessary. Either the attributes are inseparable from God’s very being (which pushes you toward “God is His attributes” in some robust sense), or else you have a set of realities—attributes—such that God necessarily conforms to them, which looks like a dependency relation.
• If no, then God does not necessarily possess the attributes in question, and you have conceded precisely the revisionary God problem: God’s nature is not fixed, and divine self-revelation cannot ground stable knowledge of who God is.

Either way, the attempt to make aseity something God can “take up” or “give up” is not a harmless tweak. It either denies the negotiability of aseity, or it denies God’s ultimacy.

I’m not a Thomist who claims the divine attributes are identical to one another as distinct perfections. But I do affirm that each attribute truly names God Himself—not something alongside God. The distinctions among attributes are real for us (and for how God relates to creatures), but they are not a division in God into separable parts.

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The deeper point

Open theism often wants two incompatible things:

• God as the ultimate ground (so morality, truth, revelation aren’t floating abstractions), and
• God as revisable/adaptive (so the future is genuinely open and creaturely contributions are not determined).

But if God is revisable in the strong sense—able to surrender or alter “aseity/immutability” type features—then God stops functioning as the stable ground of anything. Knowledge of God becomes fragile, because the object of knowledge is no longer fixed. And if God’s nature is not fixed, then you cannot secure the reliability of revelation, the stability of moral norms, or the ultimate intelligibility of the world.

So the Open Theist ends up paying for creaturely indeterminacy with a cost too high: divine identity becomes negotiable, and with it the very possibility of knowing God as God.