Divine Impassibility

Four Views of God's Emotions and Suffering

Robert J. Matz, A. Chadwick Thornhill, Robert J. Matz, A. Chadwick Thornhill

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780830852536
• eBook ISBN: 9780830866625
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Does God suffer? Does God experience emotions? Does God change? How should we interpret passages of Scripture that seem to support one view or the other? And where do the incarnation and Christ's suffering on the cross fit into this?

This Spectrum Multiview volume brings together four theologians with decidedly different answers to these questions. The contributors make a case for their own view—ranging from a traditional affirmation of divine impassibility (the idea that God does not suffer) to the position that God is necessarily and intimately affected by creation—and then each contributor responds to the others' views.

The lively but irenic discussion that takes place in this conversation demonstrates not only the diversity of opinion among Christians on this theological conundrum but also its ongoing relevance for today.

Views and Contributors:

• Strong Impassibility (James E. Dolezal, assistant professor in the School of Divinity at Cairn University)
• Qualified Impassibility (Daniel Castelo, professor of dogmatic and constructive theology at Seattle Pacific University)
• Qualified Passibility (John C. Peckham, professor of theology and Christian philosophy at Andrews University)
• Strong Passibility (Thomas Jay Oord, professor of theology and philosophy at Northwest Nazarene University

Spectrum Multiview Books offer a range of viewpoints on contested topics within Christianity, giving contributors the opportunity to present their position and also respond to others in this dynamic publishing format.

Strong Impassibility

JAMES E. DOLEZAL

The strong impassibility doctrine maintains that God is without passions.1 He neither undergoes affective change nor feels the actions of creatures on himself. Thomas Weinandy provides a succinct summary of the doctrine’s core claims: “Impassibility is that divine attribute whereby God is said not to experience inner emotional changes of state, whether enacted freely from within or effected by his relationship to and interaction with human beings and the created order.”2 It is this confession of the unchanging and passionless God that I explicate and commend in this chapter.3

The notion of a passionless God undoubtedly will strike many contemporary Christians as absurd and maybe even repugnant. What do we make of the many passages in Holy Scripture that attest to God’s love, mercy, jealousy, and wrath? Are they without meaning? How could a God without passions really love us or be genuinely indignant at sin? On the face of it, the strong impassibility doctrine might appear to undermine cherished Christian beliefs about God. Even if one grants that proponents of strong impassibility are well intentioned, are they not rather too clever by half when their position is so patently opposed to the clear witness of the Bible and to the requisite give-and-take that is involved in every act of love or wrath? These are important questions that the strong impassibility advocate must address. I will have something to say in this connection after I have developed in greater detail the meaning of the classical doctrine together with its biblical and theological foundations.

Despite modern bewilderment or offense taken at the strong account of divine impassibility, historically it commanded wide ecumenical backing, being maintained by the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Reformed, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, and more. Among Protestants, it enjoyed sponsorship from figures as diverse as John Calvin, James Arminius, John Gill, and John Wesley.4 Of course, the broad historical support by no means fixes the truth of the doctrine, but it should give us occasion to seriously ponder its claims rather than dismiss them out of hand.

A significant underlying concern of the classical impassibility doctrine is to safeguard God’s fullness and perfection of being. God cannot be the one whose greatness is beyond measure, and who is the absolute Creator on whom all creatures ultimately depend, if it turns out that he himself depends on his creatures, or on any other cause, for some aspect of his being. Every passible being depends for some feature of its being on whatever object rouses it to new states of affection. A minimally adequate defense of impassibility, then, will need to examine in some detail the unique manner of God’s being in order to establish the confession that he is the boundless Creator of heaven and earth and all that is in them and that he is in nowise measured or made to be by the creature.

The Christian tradition provides us with a rather precise metaphysical grammar by which we may speak of God’s perfection and fullness of being. The terminology of act and passive potency, while unfamiliar to many today, are particularly critical to understanding how Christians have traditionally articulated this doctrine. In what follows I will be assimilating these notions to a consideration of certain biblical passages that historically have grounded the impassibility doctrine. By underscoring the importance of impassibility as a necessary entailment of God’s pure actuality and total lack of passive potency, I will be locating the significance of the doctrine within a consideration of divine being. Talk about God’s passibility or impassibility is, at bottom, talk about divine actuality. By reducing the question to one of divine actuality, adherents and opponents are compelled to maintain either that God is being pure and simple, or that he is becoming in some sense and thus beholden to a cause of his being. For the strong impassibilist, this is what the debate is ultimately about. This approach also constrains one to say that either God loves his creatures with an unbounded act of free and uncaused love, or he loves them with a finite, caused, and mutable love. The true superabundance and limitlessness of divine love can only be maintained by the strong impassibility doctrine.

UNDERSTANDING PASSIONS

In order to better appreciate why strong impassibility denies passions of God, it is necessary to get a basic understanding of what passion means and why certain affective states humans experience—such as love, joy, compassion, fear, and anger—are called passions. Beginning with the lexical meaning, we observe that our English term passion comes from the Late Latin word passio (from the Latin patī), which means to suffer, to submit, to undergo, to experience, or to endure. It has the sense of being acted on and of receiving the action of an agent within oneself. The Latin terms are derived from the Greek words pathos and paschō, which have essentially the same meaning.5

As a received state of actuality, every passion produces a change in the subject as the consequent of some agent’s action on it. Bernard Wuellner defines passion as “any kind of reception of a perfection or of a privation; being considered as acted on by another; the reception of change in the being acted upon; any passing from potency to act.”6 George Klubertanz says passion “is the change received from an agent, considered as taking place in the patient.”7 Thomas Aquinas notes, “Passion is the effect of the agent on the patient.”8 Every passion is a caused state of being into which one is moved by the activity of some agent. For this reason, all passions are finite, dependent, time bound, and mutable states of being. Moreover, to experience passion one must possess a principle of receptivity (i.e., passive potency) by which new actuality is received. That is, one must be moveable or changeable. Metaphysically speaking, a passion is an accident that inheres in a substance and modifies the being of that substance in some way. In existential terms, every experience of passion causes the patient to be in some new way.

Passions can be either good or bad. Others can act on us in ways that produce joy or sadness, pleasure or pain. Even the term suffering, though commonly associated with the infliction of pain, does not necessarily indicate an experience of anguish or distress.9 Sometimes we deploy the language of affliction to speak of pleasant passions. Humans fall in love and are smitten by the objects of their romantic attraction. One’s beloved may even be called one’s crush. These violent terms speak of the intensity and power with which romantic love sometimes comes upon a person. The agent causing this passion is the one loved insomuch as his or her loveliness is the attractive force that moves the lover into a state of actually loving. My wife’s loveliness, for instance, is the efficient cause that draws me to her. My love for her is passionate to just the extent that I am affected and moved by her loveliness. A similar account can be given of the other passions, both good and bad. Each is a state of affective actuality into which one enters through a process of being acted on by some cause and receiving from that cause a new (accidental) state of being.

Passions are only so called because of the manner of their coming on the subject through a process of undergoing and reception of new actuality. If one were to possess the virtues of love, joy, mercy, jealousy, and the like without having undergone an intrinsic affective change produced by the action of some causal agent, then those virtues would not be passions in that case. This does not mean those virtues would be deprived of intensity, vitality, or dynamism. To speak of passionless love, joy, mercy, or jealousy means only that these states did not come upon the subject through the reception of actuality from an efficient cause of being. One person could be passionless because of the lack of love, joy, mercy, or jealousy. Another could be passionless because, although he or she is intensely and dynamically loving, joyful, merciful, or jealous, these states are not the effect of some agent’s action on him or her. I will argue later in this chapter that only virtues that are not instances of passion can be genuinely unbounded, unchanging, and free in the ultimate sense. Suffice it to say that denying passions of God by no means entails that he is without love, joy, mercy, jealousy, and so forth, but only that these virtues are not in him as the result of the determinative action of a causal agent.

BIBLICAL AND THEOLOGICAL MOTIVATIONS FOR STRONG IMPASSIBILITY

The truth of divine impassibility is most convincingly arrived at through the contemplation of other doctrines. It is a necessary entailment of doctrines such as divine aseity and independence, pure actuality, and simplicity. Each of these teachings rules out the possibility of God receiving new actuality of being, and thus of being patient to the actions of a causal agent on him. Given that all instances of passion are instances of change visited on a patient through the causal action of some agent, God must be impassible. I will consider each of the aforementioned doctrines in turn, giving the lion’s share of attention to aseity and independence.

Aseity and independence. Divine aseity (from the Latin a se, meaning of himself) teaches that God is wholly self-sufficient in all that he is and thus exists independently of all causal influence from his creatures. Herman Bavinck follows John of Damascus in declaring that God is “a boundless ocean of being.”10 He is the fountain of life for all who receive life because he has “life in himself” (Jn 5:26). God’s independence is not that of a remote or reclusive deity, but of one who is near to his creatures in self-sufficient beneficence bestowing on us life, breath, and all things (Acts 17:25). Indeed, this may well be the significance of God’s unique name Yahweh (Ex 3:15; 6:3) as it relates to his free and benevolent presence among his people (Ex 3:12; 33:19).11 God, whose very name denotes his fullness of being, is near to us as the giver and sustainer of being. I will focus on three passages in support of this claim.

Romans 11:35-36. Paul writes in Romans 11:35 (citing Job 41:11), “Or who has given a gift to him, / to receive a gift in return?” He goes on to declare why this cannot be done: “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen” (Rom 11:36). There is nothing the creature possesses that is not from or of God. As Creator, God is the absolute source of all caused being—in metaphysical speak, of all caused acts of existence and forms of actuality together with matter. Also, God himself is of himself, though not in the same way creatures are. They are of him as from a cause or principle of being; he is of himself in that he is his own sufficient reason for being. Anselm confesses to God, “You are whatever you are, not through anything else, but through yourself.”12 We need not look back any further than God for some deeper account of the creature’s being or of God’s being. Yet if God were subject to passions, then this simply could not be true. Some actuality in God’s being would be from the creature since all passions are states of actuality produced in patients through the activity of an efficient cause.

Some might object that God allows or ordains the creature to act on God and thus move him to new states of affection or feeling. Jürgen Moltmann, perhaps the foremost advocate of divine passibility in the twentieth century, maintains that God suffers actively, which means “the voluntary laying oneself open to another and allowing oneself to be intimately affected by him; that is to say, the suffering of passionate love.”13 Elsewhere he writes, “If God is not passively changeable by other things like other creatures, this does not mean that he is not free to change himself, or even free to allow himself to be changed by others of his own free will.”14 This has become a favored approach of some recent Calvinist theologians who want to affirm that creatures produce emotive changes in God, but also want to ensure that the absolute origination of this intrinsic change in God does not lie with the creature.15 From the perspective of strong impassibility, this will not do. First, this formulation must presuppose some lack of being in God and openness to new actuality. Every change brings to the one changed a new state of being not previously possessed. Moltmann’s assertion that a suffering God “does not suffer out of deficiency of being, like created beings” is nonsensical.16 Suffering, qua suffering, necessarily involves the reception of action on oneself (i.e., of new actuality) and so requires that the sufferer has lacked some form of being. Second, every change is the effect of some causal activity received in the one changed. One cannot be affected by another without being causally impacted by that one. Strictly speaking, nothing can be self-caused since causation is the conferral of some actuality already possessed in some fashion by the cause itself and lacking in the one who receives it.17 If God were moved by his creatures, even if he willed this for himself, he woul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Four Views on Divine (Im)Passibility – Robert J. Matz and A. Chadwick Thornhill
• 1 Strong Impassibility – James E. Dolezal
• 2 Qualified Impassibility – Daniel Castelo
• 3 Qualified Passibility – John C. Peckham
• 4 Strong Passibility – Thomas Jay Oord
• Conclusion – Robert J. Matz and A. Chadwick Thornhill
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• General Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for Divine Impassibility
• About the Authors
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press
• Copyright