What do we make of God’s emotions? Throughout church history, theologians have notoriously supported divine impassibility. Within the past century or so, however, many theologians have transitioned into adopting some version of divine passibility. Today passibilists occupy the majority perspective in Christian scholarship, while impassibilists persist only as a small minority (though perhaps gaining back some support in recent decades). I want to outline a few of the foremost challenges to impassibilism that have led to the growth of doctrinal passibility.
The first and unfortunate reason passibility has gained so much momentum is rooted in a misunderstanding. Clarity must be brought to the definitions of passibility and impassibility if we are to evaluate them correctly. By stating that God is impassible, its proponents do not mean to affirm that God lacks all forms emotion. Despite common attempts to ascribe such a view to historical theologians, never has traditional impassibility taught that God has no emotion whatsoever.[1] Contemporary thinkers occasionally make this mistake. Consequently, many have rejected the doctrine of divine impassibility solely on the basis of a caricature propagated by radical passibilists. Widespread interpretations of impassibility always entailed the affirmation that God possesses emotions. The church Father’s “understanding of a negative term like impassible did not prohibit the application of emotionally laden characteristics to God.[2]
Differences between the two views do not revolve around whether God has or does not have emotions but if those emotions are subjected to external factors. Both sides conclude that God possesses the fundamental biblical ascriptions of love, joy, peace, etc. Where the sides differ coincides with the possibility of a change in God’s emotion based on human acts. To put it simply, their advocates disagree on whether and to what extent human actions can affect God.
Passibility is frequently defined as the suffering of God, however, I find this to be an overly simplistic definition. Passibilists affirm that human beings cause real changes in God’s emotions, both positively and negatively. Hence God is susceptible to real suffering as a sympathetic response to human suffering or real anger as a result of human sin. Impassibilists deny this. They believe God cannot be internally affected by human beings and thus cannot suffer.[3] Rather than experiencing emotional fluctuation, God endures in an unchanging state of perfect emotion. Like most doctrines, there are strong and weak, or soft and hard versions of impassibility and passibility (the arguments I summarize here apply to the broad understanding of passibility).
Passibilists perhaps stress too much the claim that the imposed ideas of Hellenistic Philosophy upon the early Christian thinkers produced or at least strongly influenced their doctrine of divine impassibility. More specifically, the challenge is that the traditional doctrine of impassibility was shaped by Greek philosophy as opposed to Scripture. Thus the view stands on the authority of the former rather than the latter. If it is true that antibiblical Greek philosophical ideas permeated the early traditional doctrine of impassability, then surely the doctrine is muddled with errors.[4] After expounding the philosophical assumptions undergirding Stoic, Middle-Platonic, and Neoplatonic philosophy, Lister points out that “In none of these philosophical systems, however, is there an espousal of a personal, creator deity marked by absolute emotional detachment from his creation.”[5] Therefore, the caricature that impassibility teaches a non-emotional God is further weakened. Whatever the traditional doctrine is, it clearly thinks of God as having emotion.
But it remains true that the biblical conception of God entails a personal God while the Greek conceptions of God tended to be impersonal and abstract. The question then is whether historical impassibilists advanced a transcendent God who surpasses personal relationships. On the contrary, the church Fathers always expressed a personal deity, most notably in accordance with their teaching of the Trinity; and while they accepted terms and concepts imported from the Greeks for explanatory purposes, they were nevertheless selective in how they utilized Greek philosophy while firmly upholding the authority of Scripture.[6] Hence if the Hellenization charge against impassibility were true, then it is reasonable to suppose that historical impassibilists would have held a very different view of God altogether.
Now moving on to a few of the philosophical reasons that have been presented in support of divine passibility. No doubt, a primary concern for modern passibilists pertains to the incarnation. Jesus was God incarnate and clearly suffered (denying either is antibiblical), therefore, God can be said to have suffered. Moltmann takes the argument even further by supposing that God’s love along with His very nature only reaches its full completion when He demonstrates His suffering for others. As he puts it, “It was necessary for God to be Man, for only so could He be truly God.”[7] With Moltmann’s view in mind, passibilists are not required to take their perspective to this extreme. Typically impassibilists respond to the basic argument of Christ’s suffering as God incarnate by associating the suffering strictly with the human nature of Christ rather than His divine nature. This distinction is unsatisfactory for advocates of passibility who employ the argument at hand. I don’t wish to address Christological concerns in this short paper, so I will leave the debate there.
Modern passibilists such as Moltmann and Wolterstorff argue the necessity of suffering for genuine relational divine love. One who does not suffer when their beloved suffers cannot be thought of as experiencing real love. If God cannot suffer even when His beloved suffer, then He cannot be seen as genuinely loving. Lacking any vulnerability to sympathetic emotional responses, as impassibility teaches, disqualifies God from having an authentic loving relationship with human beings. If God truly loves, it follows that God is truly vulnerable to suffering. Hence, since we know that God is love (1 John 4:16), we can infer that God suffers on our behalf. The main problem with this sort of argument, as impassibilists are swift to recognize, is that it relies on the everyday human experience of love, making it far too anthropocentric. Why should we assume that personal experience of human-to-human love is a dependable measure for expanding a view of God’s love?[8] Regardless, the argument from suffering love is at the heart of the contemporary passibilist/impassibilist debate.
On the biblical side of the debate, passibilists believe their interpretation of those passages of Scripture that use terms of emotion in relation to God is simpler and therefore more accurate than the impassibilists interpretation. When impassibilists read passages that seem to describe God’s emotion, they interpret them anthropopathically. Passibilists warn against such readings and believe they come to a more natural reading of Scripture without the philosophical presuppositions supposedly read into Scripture by impassibilists. Because of the multitude of Old Testament and New Testament references to God’s wrath, anger, love, joy, etc., and no explicit teaching of impassibility, the argument concludes that passibilism is the more plausible biblical approach. Whether this argument holds merit remains to be seen. Here I conclude the brief summaries of the major challenges against impassibilism and arguments in favor of passibilism.
References
Lister, Rob. God is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013.
Moltmann, Jürgen. The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. Minneapolis, MN: First Fortress Press, 1993.
[1] Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria held extreme views of divine transcendence that were not indicative of mainstream impassibilism.
[2] Lister, God is Impassible and Impassioned, 102.
[3] ‘Qualified impassibility’ generally teaches that God can be affected by humans insofar as He allows it. Meaning, what qualified impassibilists deny is that God can be affected involuntarily, though He can and does experience voluntary affection.
[4] Ibid., 45.
[5] Ibid., 61.
[6] Ibid., 62-63.
[7] Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 33.
[8] See my paper called Critiquing the Argument for God’s Passibility from the Necessity of “Suffering Love”.
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