Does God Repent?

…catholic accounts of God’s perfections have stressed that God’s repentance signals that God is working a change in the course of history. The early Reformed theologian Amandus Polanus, for example, writes that divine repentance is not a divine “perturbation” or “change of counsel” but rather a “change of works.” In fact, because God’s counsel already encompasses the developments of history, it is not abrogated but rather executed precisely by God changing the conditions of his creatures.92 Similarly, Francis Turretin comments that repentance should be understood in a manner that befits God: “not by reason of counsel but of event, not by reason of his will but of the thing willed, not by reason of affect and internal sorrow but of effect and external work, because he acts as a penitent man is accustomed to act.” That is, God repents not “patheti-cally” but “energetically. “93

Jesus and the God of Classical Theism, Steven Duby, page 28