GETTING EMOTIONAL ABOUT IMPASSIBILITY: An Existential Defense

When you think about what God is like, what comes to mind? The Bible tells us that He is holy, patient, just, merciful, faithful and sovereign, among other things – that He is Love itself (1 John 4:8). A few other traits on the top of this list might be his “omni” characteristics: He is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. Sometimes we even talk about God in negative terms of what He is not:  in-finite (not limited), in-effable (not-describable), im-material (not physical) and im-mutable (not changeable).

But is God also – impassible? No, it's not a typo and impassibility isn’t a subject you’ll hear much about on Sunday mornings, but its meaning is found in the word “passion,”  the Latin root of which means to suffer. It’s why we refer to the suffering that Jesus experienced leading up to and on the cross as the passion of Christ. Negate “passion” with the prefix “im-” and you get a word that, when attributed to God, means that God does not suffer – impassible. 

On the surface this might not seem hard to swallow since, after all, an omnipotent Being that causes mountains to melt like wax in His presence probably isn’t in the habit of your typical forms of suffering. But the doctrine of divine impassibility doesn’t just include the idea that God doesn’t suffer pain; it also entails that God doesn't have emotions like humans do. A God without emotions? No wonder it’s not a topic we hear about on Sunday mornings. It’s not the kind of thing that fills offering plates or new member classes. Our modern touchy-feely context, has turned the topic of divine impassibility into a widely contentious, emotionally-charged issue for the first time in the 2,000 year history of the church.

Even though divine impassibility might not be as well-known as God’s more popular attributes – His love, holiness and omni-traits – it is an aspect of His nature that has been affirmed by the overwhelming majority of trusted church authorities, preachers and authors down through the ages. Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, Edwards, Spurgeon, C.S. Lewis and others all endorsed the view that God does not have emotions. So we’re not dealing with some weird new doctrine cooked up by a fringe group of stoic stick-in-the-muds on the outskirts of Christianity. 

It is, rather, a time-tested mainstay of Christian theology that wasn't even debated in the church until the mid twentieth century, emerging as a reaction to both world wars and the Holocaust, most notably in the work of Barth, Moltmann, Bonhoeffer and Brunner. More recently, suffering-God theology has gained interest in its strongest form among process theologians and Open Theists, while subtle, more sophisticated versions of it have surfaced among controversial Catholic theologians like Hans Urs von Balthasar and Hans Küng. Even widely-respected conservative evangelical scholars who claim to hold to divine impassibility have opted for limp, watered-down versions of the doctrine characterized by inconsistencies and what seems to be a general desire to have their cake and eat it too. Though it is not the primary focus of this paper, I will start by addressing a few common objections to impassibility so that they don’t get in the way of my case for a more existential defense. 

A Brief Look at Common Objections

The first line of objections voiced about impassibility is usually, “But what about Jesus?” He was God and obviously suffered. He even had emotions, evidenced by His anger toward the money changers and his weeping over the death of Lazarus. But the controversy over impassibility is a much different issue when it comes to the person of Christ (who was God in-the-flesh) because the church has always affirmed the obvious reality that Christ suffered. However, His suffering was understood to be confined to his human nature (in-the-flesh), precluding any suffering in His divine nature, including the persons of the Trinity. The profundity of the Trinity is rivaled only by the mystery of the Incarnation. So that we don’t get too sidetracked by a discussion unrelated to the focus of this paper, let it suffice to say that the church as a whole officially condemned teachings that claimed suffering in the Godhead as heresies early in the third century (e.g., Sabellianism and Patripassianism).

Once the Incarnation issue is settled or tabled for a later time, critics will usually bring up difficulties with reconciling biblical passages that forcefully express God’s anger, pleasure, jealousy and other emotional states. The clip featuring Oprah Winfrey should serve as a lesson to us all that this debate is much bigger than just a bunch of theological hair-splitting. Oprah’s misunderstanding as a young woman altered the entire trajectory of her life and thus the lives of multiplied millions of followers within her circle of influence. Apparently she didn't search very hard for more substantial answers beyond her knee-jerk reaction, but she is nonetheless picking up on a palpable tension here. What are we supposed to think when the Bible says so explicitly, “For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God” (Ex. 20:5 ) and “for you shall worship no other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God” (34:14)? God Himself underscores his warning by saying that his very NAME is Jealous – with a capital J! But is God really a jealous lover, pacing holes in the golden carpet of Heaven, huffing and puffing at the thought of his bride (the church) being unfaithful?

The short answer to this dilemma is simply addressed by proper hermeneutics (Bible interpretation techniques). We know from the Scriptures that Jesus was literally born in an actual town called Bethlehem. The Bible also says that, “He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge” (Ps. 91:4). But after reading the second passage, most people wouldn’t conclude that God is a bird-like creature with actual feathers and wings. No, because we read passages like these as they were meant to be read, as metaphors – as poetry. Why? Is it just a capricious choice to interpret a particular passage literally or figuratively based on how well it serves a particular agenda? No, because we also know from the Scriptures that God is a spirit and that spirits are not composed of bodies, feathers, wings, arms, legs, eyes, hair or any other physical part attributed to God in the Scriptures.

But figurative language like this is not meaningless or purely relative just because it’s not meant to be taken literally. Several years ago I went on a missions trip to a remote part of Brazil. While speaking to natives living deep in the Amazon jungle we had to communicate through two different interpreters, one who translated English into Portuguese and another who translated Portuguese into the native tongue of the Sateré people – a patience-testing exercise similar to the telephone game I played as a child. On one particular occasion the chief of the village we were in kept repeating, “Jesus is a chicken. Jesus is a chicken,” back and forth several times through both of our frustrated translators who were just as stumped as we were. Our confusion came from the fact that we were interpreting his statement literally, unaware that he was referring to the figurative language used by Christ himself in Matthew 23 when he is weeping over Jerusalem as a “hen who gathers her chicks under her wings” (v.37). The light bulb eventually switched on above all the foreign faces in the room as we nodded our heads in unison, “Ohhhhh… Jesus is a chicken.”

Verses about God’s nostrils, hands and mouth really do pick out truth about Him, but in an analogous way. The psalmist uses language about God’s “wings” and “feathers” to describe Him as our loving Protector – something that is literally true about Him. Likewise, the doctrine of impassibility simply entails that when the Bible attributes human emotions to an infinite, immaterial, immutable God, it does so metaphorically, or more specifically, anthropomorphically. 

One last common objection I'd like to deal with very quickly is, "What about the Scriptures that say God is Love?" I mean, c'mon Mark, surely you're not trying to tell me that God doesn't even exhibit positive emotions like love and joy?" To put it simply, love and joy are not emotions in this case, so there is no need to worry about God being some kind of divine statue who is cold and indifferent to us. See Doug Beaumont's brief treatment of this issue in Aquinas' Summa Contra Gentiles.

There are many other strong arguments for impassibility since it is thoroughly tied to other aspects of God's nature (particularly His immutability, immateriality, aseity and perfection). And though so much more could be said at this point, my goal here is not to give a rigorous theological/philosophical defense of impassibility. I need to move forward at the risk of inadequately explaining this often misunderstood doctrine so as not to get bogged down in questions (good questions) unrelated to my main defense. Perhaps this is inevitable and your comments will bear this out. But, for the time being, I would simply ask that you recognize the overwhelming consensus of church history for the better part of the last two millennia that have affirmed and defended the doctrine of divine impassibility. My goal here today is to give a defense of divine impassibility that comes from a more existential angle.

An Existential Defense

With that being said, let me shift gears so that I can tease out what I will argue is the primary objection to adopting an impassible view of God. You may find yourself taking little issue with divine impassibility up to this point as long as it remains an abstract theological concept. But it doesn’t take a theologian or philosopher to recognize the far-reaching ramifications this doctrine may have for everyday faith.

It wasn’t so long ago that impassibility sounded like pure madness to my own ears, so I’d like to present some of the ways I came to see how wonderful it is that God does not have emotions. Admittedly, it sounds strange, doesn’t it? When have you ever said to someone, “You have no emotions!” and meant it as a compliment? So why should it be any different with God? The reason I’m not spending a lot of time with a biblical/theological/philosophical defense is that I really don’t think most people who are reluctant to accept impassibility reject it for these kinds of reasons. Rather, it is for emotional reasons that the idea of an emotionless God makes so many of us uneasy.

When I first came into contact with the doctrine of impassibility, the familiar communication and the precious sense of intimacy I had come to know with the Lord came to a screeching halt. I was constantly afraid of ascribing something to God that isn’t actually true of Him. It was nothing short of crippling, even though I knew it was perfectly acceptable to speak to and of God with figurative language. After all, biblical writers did it and sometimes (even most of the time) figurative language is all we have at our disposal. In fact, our words can never fully describe God, it’s what it means for Him to be ineffable. But this was no consolation because even if I was eventually able to return to a more natural use metaphor, analogy and poetry, I wasn’t sure that it would matter.

In my prayer life:
“Lord, I’m sorry for grieving the Holy Spirit yesterday by my sin.”
“Wait… never mind, you’re not actually grieved.”

During worship:
“Lord, I sing of your greatness, be pleased with my worship.”
“Oh wait… never mind, you’re not actually moved by this at all.”
 

What may seem to be an unrelated side note at first glance, Dominican priest, Gilles Emery points out that historic church councils have not only rejected pantheism in it’s most blatant forms, but also in its more subtle forms, denouncing the notion that “God might acquire a greater perfection or a greater happiness from creation or by means of action in the world.”  (Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering, Keating and White, p.34) Accepting the fact that God is not the least bit affected or saddened by all the suffering and evil He sees in the world (including my own sin) was hard enough to accept, but the idea that He isn’t even moved to pleasure or delighted by the good things we do either (e.g., prayer, worship, acts of service) was almost too much to bear. An unfamiliar breed of fear crept in on me as a precious piece of my relationship with God was evaporating into little more than a hollow nostalgia right before my eyes. It almost brought me to the point of despair; the only solace I could find was in contemplating passages like Ps. 22:1-2:

My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?
Why are You so far from helping Me,
And from the words of My groaning?
O My God, I cry in the daytime, but You do not hear…

It’s no wonder why critics of impassibility think that, by suggesting God doesn’t have emotions, it makes Him out to be some kind of cold, heartless, indifferent android floating around in space somewhere, totally disinterested in humanity. But as someone who finally came out on the other side, let me say before we go any further, nothing could be further from the truth! Now, relax and take a sigh of relief if you can.

When I first crashed into this doctrine, I had no idea that eventually I would see God’s lack of emotion as something that would pull me emotionally closer to Him. But first, I had to relinquish the idol I had fashioned of Him based on my own image (an image that included emotions like my own). Ironically, it was this emotional idol that turned out to be more akin to an android – which shouldn’t have been surprising considering that I had come to think of God much like a robot, one that I could program with my prayers and push buttons through worship to get what I want.

But now He is like a lion, wild, sovereign and free to do whatever He wants. The fact that an impassible God cannot be swayed is anything but a character flaw. On the contrary it is one of the most beautiful things about Him because it assures us of God's complete freedom to act. So when we are united with Him, we can be assured that it is for no other reason than that He wanted to be united with us, and in no way because we have persuaded or manipulated Him to draw us to His side. 

When humans fail to be moved by emotions, it’s true, they become nothing more than heartless, impersonal, machines. But thankfully God is not a man, so things work differently with Him. I now realize that God is so utterly beyond my use of words that I must rely on metaphors, analogies and poetry as I stumble to proclaim His majesty through prayer and worship. So, it is right and good to unreservedly say of God that we are kept safe in His hands; that He is jealous when our affections flirt with idols; that He exhibits anger when He executes His righteous judgment; and that He grieves when we sin... if we understand these things to be true of Him insofar as our limited forms of expression can convey. This is why artists and musicians should feel compelled to push the boundaries of their creativity as they strain to approach the unapproachable Light in their work until that Day when we see Him face to face.

I see interesting parallels here with the reasons many people reject Christianity and the church. Take for example the problem of evil; it is much more of an emotional/existential problem than a logical one. Likewise, many unbelievers and disgruntled Christians alike refuse to become a part of a church, not because they see a lack of truth or goodness in the church, but because they see an abject lack of beauty. Likewise, it seems that the once overwhelming support for divine impassibility has shifted, not because of some new argument that has been discovered, but because most Christians no longer see the beauty inherent in an impassible God. Many are familiar with Handel’s Messiah, but he also composed an oratorio based on the story of the resurrection featuring an aria sung by the character of Mary Magdalene entitled Se Impassible, Immortale… translation – "Thou Impassible, Immortal." That is my goal, as counterintuitive as it may sound, to hopefully show you a glimpse of just how beautiful it is that God is unmoved by our suffering and unfettered by emotions Himself.

Let’s assume for the moment that God does have feelings. Consider how many times God offers His love to us only to be rejected. Now, imagine how much pain that would cause Him to suffer. Time after time the Holy Spirit’s tugging, beckoning and wooing is dismissed in exchange for lesser earthly pleasures – as C.S. Lewis puts it in The Weight of Glory, “making mud pies in a slum.” After this, you would have to imagine that God’s patience and persistence would start to grow thin due to the tremendous amount of pain inflicted by the multiplied billions of people on this earth. And we’re not just talking about the kind of pain you and I suffer here. No, we’re talking about Divine pain. And what pain could be greater than Divine pain? What kind of unimaginable horror is the pain that is somehow wrenched in the heart of an infinite God? Pain that you and I can’t even fathom. Is it unreasonable to say an infinite amount? The bottom line is, if God suffers, how great that suffering would be, indeed.

One would have to wonder if God would grow weary of this kind of contempt as Love unimaginable is repeatedly brushed off like a pesky case of dandruff. How long could He suffer the desecration of the merciful gift He offers us in His dear Son? How long could he continue to suffer before He had to take a break from pursuing our wicked hearts? And how long could He bear the heartache before He quit seeking us altogether?

One might be tempted at this point to say, “But God is big enough to handle suffering in a way we cannot.” But I would submit to you that, if God’s tremendous size or strength makes it possible for Him to cope with suffering, it won’t be long before we’re right back at impassibility. How so? Well, if God can handle the grief we cause Him because He is bigger than the pain, I would ask, how much bigger? Would it be similar to a grown man getting shot by a BB gun? The kind of pain that stings, but is manageable? Perhaps. But if God is also infinite, it would seem that the pain inflicted by a BB gun on a grown man wouldn’t be an accurate way to describe such a monumental disparity. Perhaps shooting an elephant with a BB gun is more appropriate? Maybe a rhinoceros with extremely thick-skin or a Tyrannosaurus Rex would suffice?

Perhaps you can see where this game will take us and why I said that eventually we will end up back at impassibility. When most people think of God as exhibiting emotions and suffering, they want to say that He does so in a profound way. But to say that the grief our sin causes in God is like a BB hitting an elephant doesn’t seem to be very profound at all. The “pain” the elephant feels by getting shot with a BB gun is more of a pesky nuisance, if he feels it at all. But do proponents of a suffering God want to think of the pain He feels as little more than a nuisance? A mere formality of suffering? Pain that doesn't hurt? God “feels” pain (but not really). Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.

All these grammatical gymnastics used to support a view of literal suffering start to look a lot like figurative language. Of course you could always make the subject that’s getting shot by the BB gun smaller and more vulnerable to the pain, but should we really be comfortable with the implications of a smaller, more vulnerable God to make the subject-to-pain ratio of the illustration more to our liking? A growing number of modern theologians are, especially those associated with process-theology, Open Theism and liberation theology. With the rejection of impassibility comes the rejection of many other classically-held attributes of God. Immutability, omniscience, eternality and other divine characteristics have all fallen one by one like dominoes as modern theologians trade transcendent qualities in order to cram God into the shape of an emotional man.

Despite the logical contradictions, are we comfortable with the idea of the God we depend on for holding our very being in existence enduring, surviving or coping with anything? How can we be assured that He doesn’t also struggle with great pain in keeping the atoms in our bodies from spinning off into oblivion? Do we want a vulnerable God in charge of such cosmic responsibilities? Both vulnerability and emotions require weakness and potential for change – both things Christianity has traditionally rejected when speaking of God. Weakness and vulnerability makes for authentic, humble people, but when ascribed to deity, you're left with a divine soap opera right out of Greek mythology.

One of the reasons impassibility is such a good thing, the desired thing, is that it assures us that God will never stop pursuing our good. He is always willing and acting for our good and He never becomes weary of it despite the way we constantly run against the grain of His goodness toward evil, toward our own destruction. While critics tend to think the doctrine of impassibility renders God as a cold, lifeless, timeless, Stonehenge-like structure, this an unfair portrayal. Granted, allegories that paint accurate pictures of such transcendent realities are hard to come by but let me try to wrap up with a few that I’ve found to be particularly helpful. 
 

In contrast to a lifeless statue, God is more like a dynamic wind that always blows in the same direction, with the same force, toward the good – His and ours. In this allegory, you and I play the role of ships with sails unfurled. When, through our free wills, we turn the rudder of our lives in such a way that we move against the wind, we experience what seems to us as the violent anger, sadness, judgment, and jealousy of God as his goodness rips our sails to shreds thanks to our rebellious wills. However, when we turn our rudders in such a way that the wind fills our sails, we experience what seems to be the delight and pleasure of God as we move along united with Him on our way toward our own good. Ultimately, all of these emotive characteristics can be boiled down to either being unified with God as He moves toward the good or opposed to Him, the latter of which is a scary thing.

In an article in which he compares impassibility with it’s close cousin immutability, Gilles Emery makes the observation that “just as the affirmation of divine incomprehensibility is not to be equated with irrationality, so God’s immutability should not be thought of as inactivity; God acts by a voluntary impulsion from within rather than being swayed from without. (Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering, Keating and White, p.29)

God Doesn't Need You

One statement set me on my initial journey into the despair of impassibility and back again, and it happened in the first week of what would eventually become the best course I ever took in seminary. My profesor said, “The most important thing you can learn in this class is, God doesn’t need you.” And he didn’t mean that God doesn’t need us for     x     (fill in the blank) – for creation, for friendship, for... whatever. God simply doesn’t need us for anything – uncategorically! Wait a minute, how could God not need someone as awesome as me? Like the doctrine of impassibility, this statement seems cold and heartless, until you realize what implications this has for the nature of God’s love toward us. If God truly didn’t need us in any way, it means that He was perfectly content and happy within the divine relations of Trinity and yet... He still WANTED to create us. And it wasn't because it would bring God more glory because, as discussed, God is supremely glorious without us – He doesn't need us (or anything else) to be glorified. This great mystery of the sheer act of His will to create us flows purely out of His goodness and love. Do you see it? When God created us it was a completely gratuitous act of love! Completely excessive! A totally superfluous gift of Divine goodness that has been lavished upon us. Wow!

The same statement that scared me to death at the beginning of my journey is now something I cling to with a great deal of affection.  In Heaven we’re not going see a Being who’s dealt with His fear, overcome anxiety or grief. We are going to see God’s Being, the Beatific vision, pure, complete, joy and bliss! How can God truly love me if He can’t feel my pain? Because He’s going to get rid of it. It is not God who is moved by our suffering, rather it is that He loves us enough to move us to Himself, who is the end of our suffering!

So does God care about your suffering? So much so that He is going to give you Himself for eternity. Is He active concerning our suffering, yes! But He is not boo-hooing over it as He goes about His providential plans for bringing our suffering to an end. So the answer to suffering in the world is the happiness we will eventually have in God provided by the death and resurrection of Christ, our High Priest who can sympathize with our human weakness, the Man of Sorrows who suffered and suffered greatly.

All analogies limp, and this last one is not perfect either, but Paul Gavrilyuk, Professor at St. Thomas University in St. Paul, Minnesota provides a powerful allegory about the beauty of impassibility in his book, The Suffering of the Impassible God:

Consider the case of a house on fire. Several people are unable to exit the building and cry aloud desperately for help. Firemen have been called, but for some reason they do not come. A crowd is gathering around the house. Some stare at the house with a mixture of anxiety, fear, and curiosity. Some attempt to visualize as vividly as possible what the people who are in the house must be going through. These members of the crowd burst into tears, yell, tear their hair; in short, they are greatly emotionally affected. One of them has already had a fit and lies unconscious. Another has become mad and predicts the end of the world. Yet another person decides literally to suffer with those who are in the house and commits suicide by burning himself. Panic grows. A certain man from the crowd, without going through all the emotional pangs that those standing near him are experiencing, being motivated only by his conviction that the people will surely die if there is no one to help them, breaks into the house and, at great risk to his own safety, rescues them. If it is asked, who out of all the people that were present at the scene manifested genuine compassion, the answer is obvious. (p.10)

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