God Is Impassible and Impassioned

Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion

Rob Lister

• Éditeur: Crossway
• Année: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781433532443
• Sujet: Teología y religión
• Sous-sujet: Teología cristiana

Modern theologians are focused on the doctrine of divine impassibility, exploring the significance of God's emotional experience and most especially the question of divine suffering. Professor Rob Lister speaks into the issue, outlining the history of the doctrine in the views of influential figures such as Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther, while carefully examining modernity's growing rejection of impassibility and the subsequent evangelical response. With an eye toward holistic synthesis, this book proposes a theological model based upon fresh insights into the historical, biblical, and theological dimensions of this important doctrine.

1

Impassibility

What’s in a Name?

The SS hanged two Jewish men and a youth in front of the whole camp. The men died quickly, but the death throes of the youth lasted for half an hour. “Where is God? Where is he?” someone asked behind me. As the youth still hung in torment in the noose after a long time, I heard the man call again, “Where is God now?” And I heard a voice in myself answer: “Where is he? He is here. He is hanging there on the gallows.”¹

So began a powerful plea for belief in a suffering God in the wake of the twentieth century’s icon of injustice and wickedness. The prose is riveting. The historical referent of the Holocaust is haunting. And insofar as it bears on the specific concerns of this study, the theology informing this famous quotation represents a seismic shift in the modern theological appraisal of the doctrine of divine impassibility.

The Issue

Interestingly, in this quotation of Jürgen Moltmann, in which he is adapting an account from Elie Wiesel’s Night, it appears that Moltmann may well have departed from Wiesel’s original sentiments.² What is quite clear, though, is that Moltmann himself commends to his readers the theology of a suffering God. Though we will parse out the details more precisely as we progress, it suffices for now to say that in the world of academic theology, an affirmation of divine suffering is typically known as a belief in divine passibility. Divine passibility in turn is, quite obviously, the antithesis of divine impassibility, the view that, in some important senses at least, God transcends (i.e., cannot be afflicted with) suffering. The shift in thinking on this matter in modern theology truly has been seismic. Whereas up to the modern era the church could be widely characterized as affirming some notion of divine impassibility, modern theology has broadly rejected the former consensus and championed divine passibility in its place. As a consequence, we have, in the words of Ronald Goetz, witnessed “the rise of a new orthodoxy.”³

Part of the reason for this dramatic doctrinal overhaul in modern theology is that many contemporary passibilists have (mistakenly, I will argue) taken divine impassibility to mean that God has no emotional capacity and no interest in his creation.⁴ Hastings Rashdall, for example, criticizes the Patristic and scholastic affirmations of impassibility as being endorsements of a God who is “cold, passionless, and loveless.”⁵ Perhaps even more starkly, Vincent Tymms claims that the God of impassibilism is nothing more than an “infinite iceberg of metaphysics.”⁶

As it is fleshed out in theological argument, contemporary passibilists have advanced a number of reasons for abandoning the impassibilism of earlier centuries. As they see it, impassibilism is to be chided for (1) dismissing the straightforward readings of numerous biblical texts that powerfully display divine passion, (2) failing to take the love of God and, thus we are told, the possibility of meaningful relationship with God seriously, (3) failing to take the incarnation and cross seriously, and (4) failing to take the problem of evil and suffering seriously. Broadly speaking, then, passibilism is inclined to see impassibilism as failing to uphold the proper balance of divine transcendence and immanence, in that it overemphasizes the former to the neglect of the latter.⁷

Though impassibilists may find themselves in a minority position in more recent history, they nevertheless have attempted to defend their own views and the views of their tradition with what they believe to be suitable responses. Thus, impassibilists have countered the passibilist charges with claims that (1) the theological method undergirding much passibilist exegesis is simplistic and (2) in their attempt to take the love of God, relationship with God, the incarnation and cross of Christ, and the problem of evil seriously, passibilists are often either reductionistic or extrabiblical themselves. In a broad sense, then, impassibilism is inclined to see passibilism as failing to uphold the proper balance of divine transcendence and immanence, in that it overemphasizes the latter to the neglect of the former.⁸

My purpose in this book is to address this seeming theological impasse. Upon concluding the historical and biblical investigations, I will offer my own explanation as to how both divine impassibility and divine impassionedness, when rightly understood, can and must go together. As we will see, this conclusion aligns, in principle, with the best of the impassibility tradition in terms of this juxtaposition of themes, even as I attempt to develop and expand a bit upon this foundation.⁹ Before proceeding any further, however, we should give some attention to the important matter of the terminology involved in this debate.

Definitional Factors Related to Impassibility

While the basis for the definition of impassibility will have to be demonstrated in the chapters providing historical analysis, it bears frontloading this project with some preliminary definitional comments in order to provide the basic framework necessary to enter the discussion.

Impassibility in Early Christian Thought

We may begin our remarks by expanding a bit on the observation that when compared with the early church, many modern theologians reflect a deep divergence with the tradition, not only in their evaluation of divine impassibility, but also in their basic understanding of what divine impassibility is thought to mean in the first place. Marc Steen has captured the force of this point nicely.

“Apathy” as it used to be understood, is not necessarily identical to what is understood by it now. In the first systematic text treating our topic, namely, in the Gregory Thaumaturgus’ third-century treatise addressed to Theopompus, we are informed that a loving God must be “impassible.” Nowadays the reverse reasoning is in vogue: if God is love, then He must be “passible.” A misunderstanding of this conceptual difference leads to a veritable tower of Babel. Fighting traditional theism at the present time as if it introduced the notion of an “apathic,” that is a cool and indifferent God, often seems to be a battle like Don Quixote’s. It is, in any case, necessary to recognize that the term “(im)passibility” does not always and everywhere have one and the same connotation.¹⁰

It is hard to overstate the importance of this point. To put it bluntly, both ancient advocates and contemporary critics of divine impassibility use the same terminology, but they often mean quite different things when they explain what it means for God to be impassible.¹¹

Whereas we have already seen that contemporary passibilists have frequently asserted that the doctrine of divine impassibility conveys God’s absence of emotion, the most representative statements of the classical tradition do not, in fact, assert God’s indifference to and aloofness from creation, nor do they claim that God was devoid of vibrant affection. Rather, in the main, the classical tradition simply sought to preserve the notion that, as the self-determined sovereign, God is not subject to emotional affects that are involuntarily or unexpectedly wrung from him by his creatures.¹² As we will see further on, this dimension of God’s self-determination was nearly always held in tandem with an affirmation of God’s meaningful emotional experience by the major proponents of the classical impassibility model.

J. I. Packer clearly expresses this classical sentiment about God when he asserts that impassibility is

not impassivity, unconcern, and impersonal detachment in the face of creation; not insensitivity and indifference to the distresses of a fallen world; not inability or unwillingness to empathize with human pain and grief; but simply that God’s experiences do not come upon him as ours come upon us, for his are foreknown, willed and chosen by himself, and are not involuntary surprises forced on him from outside, apart from his own decision, in the way that ours regularly are.¹³

As we look toward the fuller historical investigation, these statements can count as something of a provisional definition of the classical view of divine impassibility.

Impassibility, Patripassianism, and Theopaschitism

Having said all that, it is also necessary to distinguish impassibility from two related theological terms that were part of the landscape in the doctrine of the early church: patripassianism and theopaschitism. Patripassianism is another name for the Trinitarian heresy of modalistic monarchianism or Sabellianism.¹⁴ In the contemporary discussion, passibilist theologians are sometimes charged with advocating patripassianism.¹⁵ In actual fact, though, this is an imprecise charge, because it misses a nuanced distinction between passibility and patripassianism. We might put it this way: it is possible—as with most of the leading contemporary passibilists—to deny patripassianism and still affirm passibility. That is, both concepts get at the suffering of God, but they do so in different ways. Patripassianism affirms that the Father suffers on the cross because of a modalistic understanding. Most contemporary passibilists, on the other hand, allow the Trinitarian distinction of persons a...