John Peckham's Divine Attributes seeks to vindicate what he calls a moderate classical view of God. Peckham begins his book with some biblical parameters on the doctrine of God and a sketch of the debate between the biblical narrative and the so-called ‘God of the philosophers’ before going into the divine emotions in relation to God's essential immutability in chapter 3. He concludes there that ‘an adequate canonical model must affirm that God is both changeless in some crucial respects and changes relationally in other respects (including emotional change)’ (p. 63). While remaining essentially unchanging in his moral character and independence, God feels emotions and responds to creatures reciprocally. These emotions and relational changes are voluntary on the part of God, and remains only analogical to human affections, purified as they are from their irrational connotations in fallen human beings. In chapter 3 Peckham argues that time should be minimally understood as successions in God's life, which God freely experiences as he creates and relates with the world. As such Peckham rejects divine timelessness. Chapter 4 argues that God has definite foreknowledge, and that this is compatible with humans enjoying libertarian free will. Chapters 5 and 6 follow through on that conclusion by affirming a model of divine providence consistent with libertarianism and draws out its resources for responding to the problem of evil. In this regard, Peckham affirms the distinction between antecedent and consequent wills of God (which he calls God's ideal and remedial will, respectively) – a distinction found in classical Arminianism. Chapter 7 focuses on the Trinity, and argues for a broadly social view of the triune God, with the persons each having a ‘distinct faculty of reason, will, and self-consciousness’ (p. 241). This chapter also shows Peckham's rejection of what he calls strict simplicity, with all of its concomitant commitments about God's immutability, impassibility and pure aseity.

There are features of Peckham's book that are worthy of commendation. It is clearly written and is saturated with scriptural citations and biblical observations that go beyond mere proof-texting. Contemporary proponents of traditioned doctrines such as divine simplicity and immutability do well to continue to wrestle with the scriptural observations Peckham marshals against these doctrines.

Yet there are issues to be raised. In his description of classical accounts of theism, Peckham relies primarily on secondary sources from recent material, and this causes particular interpretive problems. For example, Peckham argues that ‘if God is pure act, God could not be pleased or displeased by humans’, while quoting James Dolezal to the effect that human sin can have ‘no effect on God’ (p. 61). But this is a misunderstanding of the classical theistic position – that God has no real relation to the creature is actually constructed to preserve the utter gratuity of God's benevolence and pleasure toward his people. God's independence from the creatures means that God's free decision to be with his people is utterly gracious and boundless, uncaused by anything creatures have done. As theologians like John Webster have demonstrated on the tradition (to which Peckham alludes but does not fully engage on p. 107), that God is unaffected by the creature does not imply that God does not care, or that God cannot be pleased by creatures – it means that God is independent from and is never a passive recipient of creaturely action. Creatures, however, receive God's good gifts by his pleasure. Further, creatures can receive God's goodness as mercy or wrath depending on what creatures do, but this does not imply that God changes – it means that the way creatures receive that goodness changes depending on their actions. In this regard Peckham's book would have benefited from direct engagement with primary sources from the tradition ranging from Augustine to the medieval doctors to Protestant scholastic theologians like Voetius, Turretin and Van Mastricht, who have addressed at length many of Peckham's objections. To take one more example of where such engagement might help, while Dolezal might maintain that God's pure actuality is a pre-set hermeneutical principle theologians impose on the biblical text (an allegation to which Peckham refers on pp. 57–8), there is significant witness to the effect that God's divine simplicity, immutability and aseity are actually rooted in the exegesis of the biblical unfolding of the divine name (Exod 3:14). Peckham may well still disagree with the exegesis offered by theses authors, but it would be a mistake to claim that the difference is solely one of pre-biblical philosophical assumptions versus Peckham's biblical take; it is rather between two competing readings of the Bible. When Peckham does comment on historians like Paul Gavrilyuk, to the effect that there is diversity in the patristic material on God's impassibility, he questionably applies Gavrilyuk's material on paradoxical christology to theology proper. These appeals to diversity (see e.g. p. 99) or contradiction in the tradition are often made to make room for disagreeing with the tradition or to introduce Peckham's own views. While I am sympathetic to the appeal to diversity, however, Peckham relies on secondary accounts for the presence of such diversity in the tradition, and mostly from the judgments of contemporary philosophers. Historians like Lewis Ayres and Michél Barnes, however, have noted the significant unity of the patristic theologians on matters like divine simplicity, aseity and immutability, and Peckham would have done well to engage with this stream of scholarship.

While I remain unpersuaded that his position is a moderate take on classical theism (rather, it seems to fit hand in glove with particular modern trajectories that emphasise reciprocity in God, emotional and relational changes, and social views of the triune persons), all in all, Peckham's book is worth engaging with to get a sense of the current debates on theology proper, and for a rather stimulating proposal on the divine attributes.