“GOD WITHOUT PASSIONS—THE DOCTRINE OF DIVINE IMPASSIBILITY: HOW THE IMPASSIBLE GOD COMFORTS THE SUFFERER”

“GOD WITHOUT PASSIONS—THE DOCTRINE OF DIVINE IMPASSIBILITY: HOW THE IMPASSIBLE GOD COMFORTS THE SUFFERER”

By: Daniel McMillin

DEFINING DIVINE IMPASSIBILITY—WHAT IS DIVINE IMPASSIBILITY? 

This paper will address how a God without passions is present in human suffering while not undergoing suffering Himself. I will offer a defense for the doctrine of divine impassibility by proposing a historical, philosophical, exegetical, theological, and practical case for a passionless God. In this paper, I argue that the impassible God is the God of history, philosophy, theology, and the Bible, who alone is capable of comforting and saving the sufferer contra the passible God. The debate between advocates of impassibility and passibility is surrounded around a conflict of opposing hermeneutics (interpretive models of Scripture), metaphysics (philosophical categories), and theologies (doctrinal commitments). Thus, I will address each of these areas from the perspective of a classical theist.[1] 

The doctrine of divine impassibility affirms that God is without passions. God does not suffer, nor does He experience emotional change. Thomas Weinandy defines this doctrine by saying, “God is impassible in the sense that he cannot experience emotional changes of state due to his relationship to and interaction with human beings and the created order.”[2] This attribute is essential for understanding and preserving the unchanging divine being as one who undergoes “no shadow of turning” (Jam 1:17). James Dolezal writes, “Divine impassibility is an indispensable feature of classical and arguably its most assailed in the contemporary literature. The doctrine maintains that God undergoes no actualization or change in his being from causes either within or without. Impassibility’s core claim is that God is without passions.”[3]

At this point, it is important to define two important terms related to this subject: (1) pathos and (2) apatheia. The word “passions” (pathos) entails suffering and change. It is a movement from one state of (emotional) being into another. Thomas Aquinas’ definiens passions as:

“In its general sense passion is the reception for something in any way at all…in its proper sense passion is used of motion, since action and passion consist in motion, inasmuch as it is by way of motion that reception in a patient takes place.”[4]

He further states, “Passion is the effect of the agent on the patient.”[5] George Klubertanz defines “passion” as “the change perceived from an agent, considered as taking place in the patient.” To clarify, the term “agent” is “that which by its activity influences the being of another,” and “patient” is “that which is affected or being changed by another.”[6] This is why Aquinas affirmed divine impassibility since “the passions of the appetites are not in God.”[7] According to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, there are three kinds of passibility:

1. External passibility, or the capacity to be acted upon from without.

2. Internal passibility, or the capacity for changing the emotions from within.

3. Sensational passibility or the liability to feelings of pleasure and pain caused by the action of another being.[8]

For God to be passionate, He must be moved by something other than Himself since “passion implies experiencing an outside influence passively as it acts upon a person to change his life.”[9] Dolezal explains:

“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, immutable 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 movable or changeable. Metaphysically speaking, a passion is an accident that inheres in a substance it 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.”[10]

 Interestingly, the terminology has shifted from the use of “passions” to “emotions” due to psychological advancements.[11] Vanhoozer defines divine “emotions” as “covenantal concern-based the theodramatic construals.”[12] However, the use of “emotions” to describe God “is not so much a return to the biblical language as it is an adoption of our modern assumptions about God.”[13]  Historically, divine impassibility was, as Paul Gavrilyuk notes, “a metaphysical term, marking God’s unlikeness to everything in the created order, not psychological term denoting (as modern passibilists allege) God’s emotional apathy.”[14] For the sake of clarity, it is best to use pathos to mean “passions” within the debate on divine impassibility.[15]

The term “impassibility” (apatheia) is used to describe the divine being.[16] God’s impassibility is an attribute of God since it is His nature to be unaffected by passions; He is incapable of potentially becoming passible.[17] God undergoes no change (mutation) ontologically within His being and will.[18] David Bently Hart defines apatheia as:

“A purely apophatic term, serving simply as a safeguard against the theologian's speculative ambitions; and this in itself demonstrates something of the distance we have traveled from earlier ages of theology when the teaching of divine impassibility was not simply a limit placed upon our language, a pious refusal to attempt trespass upon God's majesty in his light inaccessible, but was in fact very much part of the ground of Christian hope, central to the positive message of the evangel, not simply an austere negation of thought, but a real promise of joy in God.”[19]

For God to be impassible means “nothing happens to or befalls a being who is not subject to passions” since God “undergoes and experiences nothing.”[20] God “cannot be affected at all” if He is impassible.[21] A denial of passions within the divine being does not include a rejection of God’s moral excellencies. Instead, it entails that these are not “the result of the determinative action of a causal agent.”[22] Matthew Barrett divulges the nature of divine impassibility as he writes:

“To attribute impassibility to God is not to attribute something positive to him but to deny something detrimental to God—namely, change and with it suffering. Nor does impassibility mean that God is not loving and compassionate. Rather, it means that such virtues are not true of God as a result of being acted on by someone or something else. Nothing else and no one else caused such virtues to exist in God. Nor does God look to anything or anyone else for such virtues or for the actualization of such virtues. Because God is eternal and immutable, his virtues are affected and impacted by no one. If his virtues were passions, then he no longer would be pure act. Though it may be counterintuitive, impassibility actually protects other attributes like love, because it guarantees that his love will not change or fluctuate.”[23]

Currently, there is an attempt to redefine divine impassibility, where God is emotional but cannot suffer. Wayne Grudem argues, “If we understand impassible to mean ‘incapable of feeling emotions,’ then it is not correct to say that God is impassible.” But to say that impassibility means a “God’s being cannot be changed or harmed by anything outside of himself,” as though God is immune to or incapable of suffering, then this is permissible to Grudem.[24]

PHILOSOPHICAL CASE FOR DIVINE IMPASSIBILITY: GOD OF THE PHILOSOPHERS—HAS GREEK PHILOSOPHY CORRUPTED OUR UNDERSTANDING OF GOD?

Has Greek philosophy corrupted our understanding of God? Some scholars suggest that impassibility is a purely Hellenistic and Scholastic influence that clouds the interpreter’s vision of the clear biblical teaching on God’s passions.[25] For example, D.A. Carson suggests it is possible that those who subscribe to divine impassibility are “too unaware of how far they have ‘sold out’ two Greek philosophical traditions.”[26]  It should be noted that the scholastic objection to divine impassibility fails to acknowledge the earlier patristic influence of this medieval doctrine. The objection from Hellenism does not consider the various opposing views on the essence of the divine among the Greeks. Hart writes:

“Not that the church fathers were not aware of the profound difference between the God of the philosophers and the God of Scripture, between the serenely abstract and remote deity who, in late antiquity, had become the object of “rational worship” — or, at any rate, admiration —for many a refined soul, and the loving and wrathful God of the Bible, who shook with jealousy at the infidelities of his people, who created out of the depths of his love, and for his pleasure, and who finally poured himself out in Christ, even unto death, in pursuit of those who had forsaken him.”[27]

The patristics knew how to use Greek metaphysical categories and how not to allow them to drive their theology. Otherwise, they would have been pagan. Rather, they interpreted Scripture and employed Greek metaphysics, thereby allowing the Bible to determine their theology.[28] The church fathers knew how to distinguish themselves from the pagans. In addition, the church fathers are employing the means of context of Greek philosophy to articulate the Christian faith while maintaining a biblical or Christian metaphysic. We should not expect to find a post-Hellenistic (like Hegelianism) metaphysic in the early church. The early church employs the philosophical categories of their age to articulate the Christian God while being weary and even critical of contemporary philosophy and its negative effects. Weinandy illustrates how the patristic doctrine of impassibility employed their metaphysical categories as a “bridge” for the New Testament revelation. “Because the early Fathers lived and worked within the environment of the New Testament and Jewish/Hellenic ‘bridges,’ they did not think it inappropriate to use language and concepts that were prevalent among their contemporary philosophical colleagues, even though they wished to be faithful to the Jewish and Christian revelation.”[29] The church fathers were committed to the Scriptures as they employed Greek metaphysics to communicate the doctrine of God. It is for that reason that they were heavily committed to divine impassibility.

HISTORICAL THEOLOGY: GOD OF OUR ANCESTORS—WHAT IS THE ORIGIN OF THIS DOCTRINE AND ITS DEVELOPMENTS?

Historically, impassibility was affirmed on both sides of orthodoxy and heterodoxy.[30] It was affirmed by men of orthodoxy like Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Augustine, Athanasius, and even heretics like Arius and Nestorius. Throughout Christian theology, “Patripassianism,” which teaches that the sufferings of the Son are attributed to the Father, and “Theopaschitism,” which teaches that “One of the Trinity was crucified,” are the only heretical doctrines that appear to distort the passions of Christ and apply them to the divine nature.[31] The theological consensus has been that theologians have confessed that God is without passions. In fact, it was scandalous to deny the doctrine of impassibility until recently. Ironically, it is now scandalous to affirm divine impassibility.[32] A.M. Fairbairn was among the first to critique the classical doctrine by saying, “Theology has no falser idea than that of the impassibility of God.” He further notes, “the very truth that came by Jesus Christ may be said to be summed up in the passibility of God.”[33] This is a controversial departure from the classical doctrine of divine impassibility and the Christian tradition, as it was affirmed by those at the Council of Nicaea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon. Stephen Wellum writes the following:

“Divine impassibility has been consistently affirmed from the patristic era to our own, although recently, modern/postmodern theology has questioned its validity due to an embrace of social-relational views of God and especially more panentheistic conceptions of the God-world relationship.” If that is the case, then why has the doctrine of impassibility widely rejected today? “One of the challenges raised is how to reconcile God’s impassibility with biblical language about God’s compassion, mercy, patience, rejoicing, pleasure, love, wrath, and jealousy.”[34]

Similarly, David Bently Hart highlights how divine impassibility is undoubtedly the position of the patristic and medieval periods:

“God’s impassibility, the venerable patristic and mediaeval doctrine that the divine nature is in itself immutable and immune to suffering—may well prove to be a piece of conceptual furniture for which fewer and fewer theologians can find or remember a proper use. That the Christian God is possessed of impassibility, or apatheia (to employ the proper Greek term), that he is impervious to any force—any pathos or affect—external to his nature and is incapable of experiencing shifting emotions within himself, seems to many an impossible proposition now to affirm, one certainly that is prima facie incompatible with the biblical portrait of the God of Israel and that, even more certainly, is wholly irreconcilable with what Chris tians believe occurred in the suffering and death of Christ on the cross.”[35]

The church fathers affirmed divine impassibility as a means for “safeguarding divine immutability, distancing God from illegitimate emotions of greed and lust that typified Greco-Roman deities, and they were offering an apophatic defense of God’s emotional life, namely, that God does not experience emotions in the same way as humans do. For the church fathers, Christ’s passion is not in contradiction with the perfections of God’s immanent nature, including immutability and impassibility.”[36] Divine impassibility protects the divine essence from undergoing emotional alteration and is thereby mutable. In various ways, our formulation of the divine attributes act as safeguards to divine ontology. As Dolezal writes:

“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 calls, for some aspect of his being. Every passable being depends for some feature of its being on whatever object rouses it to new states of affection.”[37]

Dolezal challenges those who object to divine impassibility by outlining what is necessary to reject this doctrine completely. “In order to falsify divine impassibility, the critic must convincingly show that its principles lack funding from divine revelation and are therefore either unsound or unmotivated. The doctrine could also be shown that its supposed benefits could be had in some other way that would allow for passions in God.”[38] 

EXEGETICAL CASE FOR DIVINE IMPASSIBILITY: GOD OF THE BIBLE—WHY DOES THE BIBLE SAY THAT GOD HAS PASSIONS?

There is a misconception of theological exegesis that says theologians force unwarranted presuppositions to the text that dictate the meaning of a text at the expense of losing or ignoring the context. While this may be the case in special circumstances, it is relatively untrue in the field of systematic theology, especially since theology is exegetical and expositional. There are good assumptions that must be brought to the table when reading the Bible. Exegesis should inform theology, and theology should inform exegesis.[39] This approach allows the Biblical themes to be accessible and coherent by tracing the theme and organizing the thoughts in a systematic fashion. Theology does not appear out of a vacuum but is derived from Scripture.          

When discussing the divine attributes, it is important to ascertain the clear Biblical and traditional grammar that has been handed down to us throughout the centuries. Thus, Biblical exegesis necessarily cannot ignore historical interpretation.[40] To know the incomprehensible God of Scripture, we need God to accommodate our level of understanding. The way God communicates to humanity is not a problem for God but man’s ability to fully grasp the infinite. Scripture’s use of analogical language reveals metaphysical truths about the divine nature that would not be known to us otherwise.[41] God employs accommodative language in two ways: (1) Anthropomorphically: God has a body, and (2) Anthropopathically: God has emotions. These passages that employ anthropopathic language describe God’s activity from a human perspective, where God uses terms that help the creature understand their Creator.[42]

D.A. Carson objects to divine impassibility on hermeneutical grounds. He writes, “The methodological problem with the argument for divine impassibility is that it selects certain texts of Scripture, namely those that insist on God's sovereignty and changelessness, constructs a theological grid on the basis of those selected text, and then uses this grid to filter out all other texts, in particular those that speak of God's emotions. These later texts, nicely filtered out, are then labeled ‘anthropomorphisms’ and are written off.” Carson makes an excellent point by asking, “If they are anthropomorphisms, why were they selected? They are figures of speech, but figures of speech that refer to something. To what? Why are they selected?”[43] Further, “The biblical evidence in both Testaments, pictures God as a being who can suffer. Doubtless God’s suffering is not exactly like our; doubtless metaphors litter the descriptions. But they are not metaphors that refer to nothing, that are suggestive of nothing. They are metaphors that refer to God and are suggestive of his profound emotional life and his distinctly personal relationships with his people.”[44] For further elaboration, Bruce Ware notes, “Unlike in the case of Scripture’s references to God’s bodily parts, where other Scriptures tell us that God transcends those bodily qualities, understood literally, in the case of emotions we have no Scripture that would lead us to think that God actually transcends the emotions Scripture ascribes to him.”[45] For those who argue for divine impassibility, these three concerns must be addressed: (1) Are these passages being written off as analogical when they should be understood literally? (2) If these descriptions of divine emotions are metaphorical, what do they represent within God? (3) Is anthropopathic language comparable with anthropomorphic language?

First, Carson’s objection on the grounds of classical theist’s interpretive model is a mischaracterization of those who affirm doctrines like immutability and impassibility. Theologians engage with the Biblical and use the interpretive resources set before them. To suggest that those who advocate for impassibility are merely misapplying their presuppositions on the text is not only ignoring the strong exegesis and sound argumentation in their writings but is also an abhorrent error.

Secondly, Carson’s criticism concerning the anthropopathic interpretation of God’s emotions and their meaning is an excellent challenge.[46] Anthropomorphisms like God’s eyes and ears represent something about God that describes His omniscient sight and omnipresent hearing. Likewise, anthropopathic language must describe something within God; it cannot be said that these descriptions of God’s grief or anger do not mean anything. Rather, God’s grief, anger, wrath, and jealousy illustrate His opposition to sin and Satan. When Scripture describes God as “repenting” or “relenting,” Brakel suggests, “this does not suggest a change in God Himself, but rather a change in activity (in comparison to a prior moment) towards the objects of that activity, this change being according to His immutable decree.”[47] The analogical language that is used in Scripture describes God from a human vantage point so we can understand God’s nature. However, those who uphold their commitment to a passionate God view this interpretation as a softening or rejection of clear Biblical teaching. Dolezal suggests, “Such improper or nonliteral forms of attribution do not obscure the truth of God any more than talk about God’s right arm or nostrils obscures the truth about Him. Our theology should enable us to discern the various accommodated and nonliteral ways in which God speaks to us about Himself in biblical revelation. Thus, passages depicting God as undergoing change are spoken improperly and from the human vantage point and should not be taken in a strictly literal sense.”[48] 

Thirdly, Carson and Ware’s objection to the comparison between anthropomorphic and anthropopathic language seems to create a false dichotomy between these two modes of analogy. Why are exegetes willing to admit that the Bible’s presentation of God’s body is a metaphor used to accommodate the reader’s understanding of God as spiritual, but they are unwilling to grant moments where God is described with emotions as accommodative language? In response, Dolezal writes the following statement:

“The impassibilist regards the many biblical ascriptions of passion to God to be accommodated ways of speaking by which God discloses his love and justice in ordinary forms of humans experience, like houses which truly manifest divine presence and yet do not properly correspond to God's actual manner of existence. Most readers of the bible tend to instinctively do this with those passages that attribute to God body parts in actions unique to material beings. With few exceptions, modern exegetes, even many who reject divine impassibility, consistently interpret such language to be a metaphorical manner of speaking that does not actually match the precise manner of God's existence and activity. They do this even though there are far more passages that speak of God as material than speak of him as immaterial. The conviction that corporeality is proper only to creatures dictates that every biblical attribution of corporeality to God be regarded as nonliteral. And if that underlying conviction is biblically funded and theologically sound, then so are the interpretive judgments that flow from it. The impassable does effectively the same thing with respect to scriptures depictions of change in God. As all corporeal language is deemed anthropomorphic (or zoomorphic, or geomorphic) by the immaterial list, so all passion language is deemed anthropopathic by the impassable list. The impassabilit’s controlling theological principle is that being caused to be is proper only to creatures and therefore must be altogether denied of God.”[49]

THEOLOGICAL CASE FOR DIVINE IMPASSIBILITY: GOD OF THE THEOLOGIANS—IS A SUFFERING GOD DYNAMIC AND RELATIONAL?

A suffering God is dangerous for theology. The implications of affirming passions within God have disastrous consequences that will inevitably harm our doctrine of God for years to come. Unfortunately, I am afraid we are witnessing this damage to God’s character unfolding today in our distortion of the Creator-creature distinctions and redefinition of divine immutability, love, and blessedness. “The doctrine of divine impassibility runs like a golden thread through the tapestry of the Christian tradition. We should beware of pulling it out, lest we begin to unravel the whole doctrine of God. The consequences of doctrinal shift often take generations to unfold.”[50]

The doctrine of impassibility has historically been understood as a closely related attribute to divine immutability.[51] A God who is, as Paul Helm says, “immutable and impassible is by nature complete.”[52] If God experienced passions, then He would no longer be immutable since He would undergo emotional change. As Barrett writes, “Impassibility is the natural, logical, and necessary corollary to immutability…if God’s nature does not change, then neither can he undergo emotional change. Impassibility also stems from God’s supremacy, perfection, and infinitude, for any debilitation or crippling of God would inevitably mean that he no longer is that than which nothing greater can be conceived.”[53] God’s immutability is closely wrapped up with His impassibility since He cannot be changed by external causes (Deut. 10:14; 1 Chron. 29:14; Job 22:2-3; 35:6-7; Ps. 24:1; 50:10-12; Is. 40:13-14, 28; Mal. 3:6; Rom. 11:35-36; Jam. 1:17). God is unaffected by anything or anyone that would change His attributes. Ronni Kurtz describes the relationship between divine immutability and impassibility:

“The perfection of impassibility acts as a witness to divine immutability by securing the reality that God will not undergo change due to passions as He is without passions…God is pure act, and His lack of passive potency includes potency of passion. In this way, divine impassibility and divine immutability come together as reciprocally necessary and a metaphysical witness to God’s immutability.”[54]

When Scripture declares the immutability of God’s ontologically, it is understood that God cannot be acted upon; this is what is often called “actus purus.”[55] Since God is absolute perfection, He does not undergo emotional change.[56] As the uncaused first cause or unmoved mover, God cannot become what He was not or be moved into being what He has always been. If that were the case, He would constantly change from one state of suffering into a state of not suffering.

One of the major ways that God’s impassibility is preserved is through the Creator-creature distinctions. Acts 14:15 is often used as a proof text to support a passionless God. The argument is: “The Creator is not like His creation. Do not worship a passionate deity.” It is idolatrous to worship a God like man who is filled with many passions. The Greek deities on Mount Olympus were emotionally driven and divested. Passions are not to be ascribed to the God of the Bible because He is not like man or the false gods they have made in their image. “It was important for the early church to affirm divine impassibility in order to set the Lord apart from the false gods who had bodies and indulged in all manner of passion, lust, and rage.”[57]  Irenaeus employed divine impassibility apologetically to distinguish the Creator from the creature against Gnosticism, where God is not “subject to passion” since He “is impassible.”[58]

“The Father of all is at a vast distance from those affections and passions which operate among men. He is a simple, uncompounded Being, without diverse members, and altogether like, and equal to himself, since he is wholly understanding, and wholly spirit, and wholly thought, and wholly intelligence, and wholly reason, and wholly hearing, and wholly seeing, and wholly light, and the whole source of all that is good.”[59]

Regardless of where one stands on the debate between impassibility and passibility, the Creator-creature distinction should not be confused where God is more like man than God, for “there is none like” Him (Deut. 4:35; 1 Sam. 2:2; 2 Sam. 7:22; 1 Chron. 17:20; Ps. 86:8; Is. 46:9; Jer. 10:6). The primary reason why a passionate God should be rejected is because it distorts these distinctions. Fundamentally, the Creator-creature relationship entails that there be no give-and-take between God and man. Yet, the arguments for divine passibility hinge on this basis, and rather than preserving the God of the Bible, we inevitably and regrettably humanize the divine. Passions are to be attributed to humanity, not divinity. “The ability to suffer or be swayed by shifting emotional states are aspects of creation and cannot be attributed to the divine essence.”[60] When our theology begins with man to God, we run the risk of inevitably limiting God. The distinctions between the Creator and the creature are a bit blurry and distorted when God’s transcendence is no longer maintained.[61] The Creator is not a greater version of the creature where everything the creature experiences is maximally greater in the Creator.

Does God need passions to be God? “God is maximally alive,” as Barrett writes, “Impassibility does not mean that God is inert or static, which would preclude him from love. Rather, as the maximal God his impassibility certifies that he could not be any more loving than he already is. He is love in infinite measure.”[62] Further, “He is his affections in infinite measure and is so eternally. God could not be more alive than he already is. Impassibility, then, does not mean that God is inert or static, as if he cannot love, for example. Instead, it means his love is so maximally alive, so fully and completely in act, that he cannot become more loving than he already is eternally. Far from undermining love, impassibility actually safeguards God’s love, guaranteeing that his love is and remains perfect. Only an impassible love can ensure that our God does not need to be more loving than he already is.”[63] 

PRACTICAL THEOLOGY OF DIVINE IMPASSIBILITY

Why is a passionless God important to someone who is suffering? If we get God wrong and give fallacious views of God, we are offering false hope to those who are already in so much pain. When we suffer, we need a God who can truly help us in our agony. This final section will compare the impassible God to the suffering God to illustrate how the impassible God is capable of caring for those who suffer.[64]

THE CRUCIFIED GOD: (IM)PASSIBILITY AND THE CROSS— DOES A SUFFERING GOD DIE?

Moltmann painted a vivid image of those who suffered in the concentration camps during WWII, where individuals would ask, “Where is God?” Moltmann replied, “Where is he? He is here. He is hanging there on the gallows…any other answer would be blasphemy”[65] Moltmann wrote what appeared to be theologically rich and comforting, but instead opened the doors for an injured God. God becomes vulnerable to emotional fluctuation and a victim of suffering. This suffering of a passionate God makes God more personal, and for God to truly love us, He must suffer with us. However, this “suffering God” really needs help. He needs sympathy and saving. God sent His Son to save us because of His love for us, but it is also a mutual saving. As God saves humanity, he is also saving Himself. This means, His aseity is not an actual attribute He possesses. He is not independent but instead depends upon us for saving. Further, if this God experiences emotions and suffering simultaneously for all eternity, then as He endures all of the sufferings of every creature for all time, we should really feel sorry for Him; He needs more help than we do. Also, if God needs help, then we cannot truly depend upon Him in our suffering. We cannot find counsel in a God Who is suffering more than we are; He cannot really help us in our times of need.

Hart criticizes Moltmann’s model for God by writing, “in our attempts to revise trinitarian doctrine in such a way as to make God comprehensible in the ‘light’ of Auschwitz, invariably we end up describing a God who—it turns out—is actually simply the metaphysical ground of Auschwitz.”[66] Among modern theologians, the suffering and death of the Son not only belongs to the Second person of the Trinity but to the Father and Spirit as well, which is Patripassianism. As Moltmann suggests, “In the passion of the Son, the Father himself suffers the pains of abandonment. In the death of the Son, death comes upon God himself, and the Father suffers the death of his Son in his love for forsaken man.”[67]

It must be maintained that God is ontologically unaffected by the suffering and death of the Son incarnate in the economy; otherwise, God is consumed by suffering and may undergo death. Of course, this is a necessary implication of a passible deity and is the position of Moltmann. He suggests that the death of Christ must not be attributed solely to the humanity of Jesus, as it has historically been affirmed through the Christian tradition, but it must also be said that God died on the cross, which is closely aligned with Theopaschitism. Moltmann writes, “If God is incapable of suffering, then—if we are to be consistent—Christ’s passion can only be viewed as a human tragedy.”[68]

For Moltmann, and those who argue for divine passibility, to be God means to suffer.[69] “Self-sacrifice is God’s very nature and essence.”[70] God’s suffering is closely related to His experience in human history as He is passionately acted upon by His creation. “The history of the divine pathos is embedded in the history of men.”[71]The suffering God “voluntarily opens up to the possibility of being affected by another.”[72] He is passionately moved by His creation and is involved in human suffering through His own suffering. For God to be immovable is inconceivable and unacceptable for Moltmann. He argues, “The lack of any creative movement would mean an imperfection in the Absolute.”[73]

Within Moltmann’s purview, it is necessary that Jesus not only suffer in His human nature but also His divine nature. It is ontologically necessary for God to suffer in this paradigm. The cross is essential for a suffering God, which is the opposite of how Scripture presents the necessity of Christ’s death as it presents man’s need for salvation due to their sinfulness. Within this passible God model, God needs the cross more than humanity to be redeemed with mankind. “Suffering love overcomes the brutality of evil and redeems the energy in evil, which is good, through the fulfillment which it gives to this misguided passion.” Moltmann applies this suffering and evil that needs to be overcome within the being of God when he writes, “If God is already in eternity and in his very nature love, suffering love, and self-sacrifice, then evil must already have come into existence with God himself, not merley with creation, let alone with the fall of man.”[74] God must become man to end suffering for both God and man. In fact, God always intended to become man to actualize His potential. “The incarnation of God’s Son is not an answer to sin. It is the fulfillment of God’s longing to become man and to make of every man a God out of grace; an ‘Other’ to participate in the divine life and return the divine love.”[75] 

THE LOVING GOD: (IM)PASSIBLITY AND LOVE—IS A PASSIONATE GOD LOVING?

Moltmann creates a dilemma between divine suffering and love. “A God who cannot suffer cannot love either.”[76] In other words, for God to be love He must suffer otherwise He is no longer love. Moltmann’s model of love is defined by suffering since it is essential that God “suffers from the love within is the superabundance and overflowing of his being.”[77] He applies this to God’s acts of creation and salvation:

“The creation of the world and human beings for freedom and fellowship is always bound up with the process of God’s deliverance from the sufferings of his love. His love, which liberates, delivers and redeems through suffering, wants to reach its fulfillment in the love that is bliss. But love only finds bliss when it finds its beloved, liberates them, and has them eternally at his side. For that reason and in this sense the deliverance or redemption of the world is bound up with the self-deliverance of God from his sufferings. In this sense, not only does God suffer with and for the world; liberated men and women suffer with God and for him.”[78]

This rejection of divine impassibility is an attempt to preserve a passionate, divine love. The argument is made that if our experience of love requires suffering and passions then it must be that way for God too.[79]  However, God is not always in a state of love if His love is passionate. God is no longer strictly, ontologically loving but must be moved to love by something other than God. Love is not external to God since God is ontologically love. It is internal in the immanent life of the Triune God. As Barrett writes,

“Triune love does not change, nor does it need to be improved, or somehow reach its potential, as if the love of the Father for the Son must become more passionate…if God is passible, then the love between the three persons could not be more infinite in its loveliness. Impassibility ensures that the love of our Triune God is perfect.”[80]

God does not possess love but is ontologically love—His essence and existence is eternal love. God’s love is radically different than ours because while love is an emotion we have, love is just who God is. To call love an emotion, in my opinion, is more telling of our modern context than of Scripture. Hart writes, “Only a truly transcendent and passionless God can be the fullness of love dwelling within our very being, nearer to us than our inmost parts.”[81]  

While passionate love may be a good thing for man, it is not for God. “All passionate love,” according to Dolezal, “is a movement of the lover toward some perceived good in the thing loved. It is a volitional inclination toward, and a reaching out for, the good presented to it, and is called forth into actuality by that good.”[82] Passionate love eliminates the generosity of God as He freely creates, saves, and loves His creation. Only an impassible love is free because God chooses to love when we are unlovely.[83] He is not moved by His passions to love the things he has made. God does not have to be moved to love if He is ontologically the fullness or abundance of love. Dolezal further notes, “All instances of passionate love are finite states of caused actuality visited on the subject. This does not mean such love cannot be genuine or dynamic, but only that it is finite, mutable, and beholden to a cause—lacking the absolute freedom and gratuity that uniquely characterizes the love of God for the creature.”[84] It is for that reason that an impassible God of love is superior to the love of a passionate deity that is limited and possesses the potential to shift or change. Furthermore, an impassible love is the only thing perfection that would express the necessity of Christ’s mission and the possibility of redemption. Jamieson and Wittman write, “Impassibility is the strength of God’s indestructible love, the strength with which Christ’s death destroys sin’s unruly passions and its fruit, death.”[85] In short, the doctrine of impassibility allows us to say, “God is love.”

THE SUFFERING GOD: (IM)PASSIBILITY AND THE SUFFERER—DOES A SUFFERING GOD COMFORT THE SUFFERER? DOES A SUFFERING GOD SAVE?

The rejection of divine impassibility is primarily an attempt to make God personal since God appears to be impersonal and static within this frame. A passible God must suffer like us to sympathize with us. Moltmann argues that mankind not only “feels sympathy with God” but is also sympathetic “for God.”[86] Not only would God be unsympathetic if He did not suffer, but He would be unloving. Moltmann writes, “Were God incapable of suffering in any respect, and therefore in an absolute sense, then he would also be incapable of love.”[87] In light of this, one may ask, “How can God, who doesn’t suffer, truly or practically help us when we suffer?” However, this mischaracterizes the position of impassibility by suggesting a God without passions cannot also be personal. Recently, critics of impassibility have questioned whether God could relate to creatures without passions. This desire for feelings within the ontology of God is an issue that is mostly a modern standard for relationships demanding emotions.[88] Historically, this has not been an issue, especially among the patristics who preserve the transcendence and immanence of God. As Bray notes, “In saying that God is impassible, the ancients were not trying to distance him from the cares and concerns of ordinary human life, but to set him free to be able to deal with human problems in a rational way.”[89] A personal deity is the primary force of Christian theology that allows it to stand out against the wide array of religions today. But God does not have to suffer to be relational or sympathetic. In other words, God does not have to be like us to be near us. God is dynamically or energetically related to His creation infinitely as the eternal Creator.[90]

“The difficulty of answering the question of whether God has affections is exacerbated by the strong bias of our culture toward an emotional, suffering God.”[91] The argument that God cannot relate to His creation if He is passionless is due to a misconception of God where only a suffering God can understand suffering; God cannot know suffering if He does not suffer.  Brasnett writes, “Men feel, and perhaps will feel increasingly, that a God who is not passible, who is exempt from pain or suffering, is a God of little value to a suffering humanity.”[92] This is why it is necessary that God is, as Whitehead says, “a fellow sufferer who understands.”[93] However, God does not have to suffer in order to relate to or care for humanity. A watchmaker knows the ins and outs of the watch that he has designed better than the watch. Does the watchmaker have to be like the watch to know his product? No, of course not. Likewise, God designed humans and knows them better than they know themselves. He does not have to be like the watch to know the watch. However, God became what He once was not, man, not to know the creatures; He already knows them infinitely and intimately from all eternity. Rather, God became man so man may be comforted by the God who became man to sympathize with them. God can say, “I’ve been there,” because He became a man to suffer and die like us and give us hope. There is no need for the incarnation of God can already suffer and die.[94] 

In light of this, can a passible God help the sufferer? Simply having a God who suffers does not necessarily mean that He can help those who suffer. For example, when a survivor of rape is in counseling, they do not require counsel from an individual who has experienced the same things they have gone through to help them. Instead, they need a counselor who listens and helps them through their trauma. Additionally, when an individual exits their home that is engulfed by flames, they do not need someone who is in emotional distress to come by their side and add to their anxiety. Rather, they need a calm and collected fireman who is able to put the fire out. Likewise, mankind does not need a God who suffers like them because it is not helpful practically. God’s suffering may explain how He can relate to us sympathetically, but that does not entail His ability to save us from suffering. As Wellum writes:

“A God who is passible and suffers may sympathize with us, but he cannot help us. A God who is subject to emotional change raises doubt as to whether he can be trusted. In fact, it is only by affirming impassability that we have hope. God is perfect in himself. His love is not constituted by the world, but within himself. God remains true to himself, and his love and grace are free. In his creation of the world, he does not change, but relates to the world according to his sovereign will and covenant promises to redeem a people for himself, which actually guarantees that he can do something to redeem us.”[95]

Additionally, a suffering God does not offer hope for those who suffer, only despair. He cannot help us in our suffering if He is swept up in suffering too. While it may sometimes be good to have someone who has experienced pain just like us and can empathize with us through our suffering, it is not always the case that we require this sort of help. In fact, when it comes to a surgeon, we want an experienced doctor who has medical training and experience who is able to perform surgery on us and is not experiencing the same sort of pain as we do. Additionally, we do not want a clinical psychologist who brings all of their troubles to us while we are pouring our hearts out to them in therapy. Likewise, with God, we do not want someone who experiences our suffering problem as we do who is incapable of coming to our aid. Rather, like the surgeon and counselor, we want someone who is outside of pain and suffering and who can come on the inside to help us out in a time of desperation.

While a suffering God may relate to us, He cannot help us. He is like a doctor who does not take a sick day to treat his patients when they are ill. Jordan Cooper rightly notes, “The sufferer does not need to hear about a God who empathizes, but of one who is powerful enough to overcome suffering.”[96] A God who suffers like us cannot help us because He cannot redeem us. Horton explains, “God is not Almighty, but cosufferer who transforms evil into good by suffering evil in his very being. Within God’s essence, therefore, there is a tragic aspect that God must conquer through historical becoming.”[97] Similarly, Barrett writes, “If God is just as much a victim of suffering as we are, then he is helpless, powerless, and hopeless to embark on a rescue mission… Not only does impassibility guarantee that Christ can save sinners, but impassibility guarantees that God's love and grace are free. If God is passable, then his love is contingent on the creature.”[98] A suffering God is a God to be pitied, not a deity to which we can entrust our burdens and cares. If a suffering God cannot help us, what God do we need? Now, more than ever, we need an impassible God who is unaffected by suffering and immovable emotionally.

ONLY THE IMPASSIBLE GOD CAN HELP

In sum, the impassible God can comfort and care for the suffer as He stands outside of their suffering and delivers them from it, while the passible God can only aid the sufferer for a time but is incapable of saving the sufferer from pain since He cannot overcome suffering. In this paper, I have argued that the impassible God is the God of history, philosophy, theology, and the Bible, who alone is capable of not only comforting the sufferer but also saving them from suffering.

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“The Impassibility of God.” Credo 9.1 (2019).

Bauckham, Richard. “In Defense of The Crucified God.” Pages 93-99 in The Power and Weakness of God. Ed. Nigel M. de S. Cameron. Edinburgh: Rutherford House Books, 1990.

Beeke, Joel, and Paul M. Smalley. Reformed Systematic Theology: Revelation and God. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019. 

Brasnett, B.R. The Suffering of the Impassible God. London: SPCK, 1928.

Bray, Gerald. A History of Christian Theology: A Trinitarian Approach. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2024.

Biblical Interpretation: Past & Present. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996.

God Is Love: A Biblical and Systematic Theology. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012.

The Attributes of God: An Introduction, SSST. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021.

Carson, D.A. Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2000.

How Long O Lord?: Reflections on Suffering and Evil. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006.

Carter, Craig A. Contemplating God with the Great Tradition. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2021.

Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018.

“Renaissance or Revisions? Metaphysical Departures from Classical Trinitarian Theism.” Pages 615-648 in On Classical Theism. Ed. Matthew Barrett. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2024.

Castelo, Daniel. Apathetic God: Exploring the Contemporary Relevance of Divine Impassibility.

“Qualified Impassibility.” Pages 53-74 in Divine Impassibility. Ed. Robert J. Matz and A. Chadwick Thornhill. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019.

Cooper, Jordan. The Doctrine of God: A Defense of Classical Christian Theism. Just & Sinner, 2023.

Dixon, Thomas. From Passions to Emotions; The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

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“Still Impassible: Confessing God Without Passions.” JIRBS 1:1 (2013).

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Duby, Steven J. God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019.

Jesus and the God of Classical Theism. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2020.

Fairbairn, A.M., and Thomas Joseph White, Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2009.

Gavrilyuk, Paul L. The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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Does God Suffer? Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2000.

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[1] Thomas Joseph White outlines three major objections against divine impassibility:

(1) “The first objection is based upon the following claims; the conviction that love implies solidarity with suffering empathetically in who God is, in God’s very being.”

(2) “The second objection is based on the claim that, in order for God to be personal and present, he must be relational. It follows from this that, if God is not relative to his creatures, he is not personal and present to them. A God who is truly loving must be related to creatures, and therefore subject to being affected or changed by them. For this reason, an impassible God would not be truly personal and present or otherwise related to his creatures in any meaningful way.”

(3) “The third objection starts from the premise that God must take into himself the experience of evil—into his very being, nature, and life—in order to save us from evil. If this claim is true, then it naturally raises the question of how we can be saved at all if God does not suffer, let alone if he is incapable of suffering.” (Thomas Joseph White, The Trinity: On the Nature and Mystery of the One God. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022, 296-297)

White then offers three major criticisms to those who advocate for divine passibility:

(1) “We should be wary of mis-attributing merely created modes of becoming onto the divine nature. In doing so we may inevitably depict the divine nature in anthropomorphic, intrinsically imperfect, or inaccurate ways.”

(2) “There is an added danger in the language of divine passibility of projecting human pathos and suffering back from the economy of creation into the divine nature. In this way of thinking, our evil and suffering come to characterize God in what God is essentially or eternally. This attributive practice not only risks obscuring the true knowledge of God as good and perfect, but also effectively defines God in terms of moral or ontological evil. We are justified in asking if by logical consequence such a God really can save the human race, for the simple reason that he is characterized ontologically by the same quandaries as his creatures, except to a greater degree. Suffering and defect now come to characterize what God is in his very essence. Indeed the eternal life of God is constituted in part by temporal moments of suffering, so that the Trinity is constituted by the Cross. Instead of God saving human beings out of his transcendent goodness, he must instead develop gradually by overcoming evil in a shared history with us. In this case, it is the creation that gives definition and being to the Creator, and not the inverse. As a consequence, it becomes unclear how God can overcome evil and suffering, and indeed it becomes unclear even whether God can overcome evil at all.”

(3) “The notions of divine suffering and change are frequently associated with a mistaken idea of the Incarnation, which confuses God’s humanity, in which God truly suffered, with his divinity, in which the suffering Christ of divine passibility, remains impassible and immutable.” (White, The Trinity, 306-307)

[2] Thomas Weinandy, Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2000), 38. Similar definition in “Impassibility of God” in New Catholic Encyclopedia (Washington D.C.: Gale, 2003), 7:357.

[3] James E. Dolezal, “Defending Divine Impassibility” in Classical Theism: New Essays on the Metaphysics of God. Ed. Jonathan Fuqua and Robert C. Koons (New York, NY: Routledge, 2023), 252. See also, “Still Impassible: Confessing God Without Passions.” JIRBS 1:1 (2013).

[4] Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate, 26.1.

[5] Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 47.1.1.

[6] George Klubertanz, Introduction to the Philosophy of Being (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963), 163.

[7] Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, 89.1.

[8] The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. Ed. E.A. Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 823.

[9] Joel Beeke and Paul M. Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology: Revelation and God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019), I:839. 

[10] Dolezal, “Strong Impassibility,” 16.

[11] Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions; The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

[12] Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 403-416.

[13] Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2019), 129. For examples of those who employ the word “emotion” to describe God see, D.A. Carson, Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2000); R.T. Mullins, God and Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); “Why Can’t the Impassible God Suffer? Analytic Reflections on Divine Blessedness”; John C. Peckham, Divine Attributes: Knowing the Covenantal God of Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2021).

[14] Paul Gavrilyuk, “God’s Impassible Suffering,” 139.

[15] For alternative interpretations on the doctrine of divine (im)passibility, see Daniel Castelo, Apathetic God; “Qualified Impassibility” in Divine Impassibility. Ed. Robert J. Matz and A. Chadwick Thornhill (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 53-74; Rob Lister, God is Impassible and Impassioned (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012); John C. Peckman, Divine Attributes, 39-72; “Qualified Passibility” in Divine Impassibility. Ed. Robert J. Matz and A. Chadwick Thornhill (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 87-113; Thomas Jay Oord, “Strong Passibility” in Divine Impassibility. Ed. Robert J. Matz and A. Chadwick Thornhill (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 129-151.

[16] For additional treatments on impassibility see, Matthew Barrett, “The Impassibility of God.” Credo 9.1 (2019); Baines, Barcellos, Butler, Lindbland, and Renihan, Confessing the Impassible God: The Biblical, Classical, and Confessional Doctrine of Divine Impassibility.

[17] “Impassibility is not merely a choice God makes but is an attribute, a perfection that is true of his essence or nature…God is impassible by nature. He simply is not capable of being passible.” (Barrett, None Greater, 122)

[18] Donnie DeBord notes six implications of what it would mean for God to pass from one state to another: (1) God would need to be previously unaware of the condition that brought about the ‘emotion.’ Otherwise, God would be eternally aware of the event and have it in eternal perspective. (2) Process theism could be true—God doesn’t exist as a substance but as an event, and that event is always relative to the other events around it. (3) God would need to be emotionally unfulfilled in his Trinitarian life such that creatures’ relations bring fulfillment or unfulfillment. (4) God would be other than he was. (5) God would not be incorruptible. (6) God’s aseity would need to be reframed so that creation actualized God’s perfection.

[19] David Bently Hart, “No Shadow of Turning” in The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2017), 185.

[20] Dolezal, “Defending Divine Impassibility,” 252.

[21] Paul Helm, “The Impossibility of Divine Passibility,” in The Power and Weakness of God: Impassibility and Orthodoxy. Ed. Nigel M. de S. Cameron (Edinburgh: Rutherford, 1989), 120.

[22] James E. Dolezal, “Strong Impassibility” in Divine Impassibility. Ed. Robert J. Matz and A. Chadwick Thornhill (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 17.

[23] Barrett, None Greater, 116.

[24] Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2020), 196. In his first volume, Grudem rejected the doctrine of impassibility completely and has since written a revised statement, as seen above.

[25] Craig A. Carter, “Renaissance or Revisions? Metaphysical Departures from Classical Trinitarian Theism” in On Classical Theism. Ed. Matthew Barrett (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2024), 615-648; Hart, “No Shadow of Turning”; Amos Winarto Oei, “The Impassible God Who ‘Cried’” Themelios 41:2.

[26] D.A. Carson, How Long O Lord?: Reflections on Suffering and Evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 166.

[27] Hart, “No Shadow of Turning,” 186. “Although the early Greco-Roman Christians used the language of their culture and no doubt were influenced at times by cultural thought forms just as we are today, they did uncritically accept philosophical notions.” (Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, I:837)

[28] “Modern theologians often reject God's impassibility on the ground that it distances him from us and makes a personal relationship with him problematic, if not impossible. To them, this doctrine, more than any other, was evidence that traditional Christian orthodoxy, or ‘classical theism’ as it is sometimes called, has departed from its scriptural roots and must be overturned if we are to be truly faithful to God's self-revelation.” (Bray, Divine Attributes, 36)

[29] Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, 83.

[30] Hart, “No Shadow of Turning,” 186-188; Paul L. Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Weinandy, Does God Suffer, 27-39, 83-112; “The Immutable and Impassible Trinity, Parts 1-2,” 340-358.

[31] Noetus, Praxeas, and Sabellius advocated for patripassianism and John Maxentius advocated for theopaschitism.

[32] Alister E. McGrath explains that this paradigm shift in the twentieth century may be due to three main factors: (1) The rise of “protest atheism,” where the only possible solution to respond to the objection of an indifferent and invulnerable God is to say that God suffers, (2) a rediscovery of Luther and his “theology of the cross” where he uses the phrase “a crucified God,” and (3) the growing impact of the “history of dogma” movement where Greek ideas had seemingly crept into Christian theology, like divine impassibility. (Christian Theology, 183-184)

[33] A.M. Fairbairn, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1894), 483.

[34] Wellum, Systematic Theology, 613.

[35] Hart, “No Shadow of Turning,” 185.

[36] Bird, Evangelical Theology, 189.

[37] James E. Dolezal, “Strong Impassibility,” Divine Impassibility: Four Views of God's Emotions and Suffering. Ed. Robert J. Matz and A. Chadwick Thornhill, (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019).14.

[38] Dolezal, “Strong Impassibility,” 35.

[39] Grant Osborne, Hermeneutical Spiral (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006).

[40] Gerald Bray, Biblical Interpretation: Past & Present (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1996); Craig A. Carter, Contemplating God with the Great Tradition (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2021); Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition: Recovering the Genius of Premodern Exegesis (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2018); R.B. Jamieson and Tyler R. Wittman, Biblical Reasoning: Christological and Trinitarian Rules for Exegesis (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2022).

[41] For an excellent retrieval of analogy and classical theistic metaphysics, see Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019), 232-296.

[42]  See, Dolezal, “Strong Impassibility,” 34. When reading biblical texts that appear to speak of God’s suffering, Philo of Alexandria said, “What greater impiety could there be than to suppose that the Unchangeable changes?” (Quod Deus Immutabilis Sit)

[43] D.A. Carson, How Long O Lord?: Reflections on Suffering and Evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006), 165. “If the term ‘impassable’ is to be preserved,” which Carson believes that it can be insofar as one uses it “to affirm that God is never controlled or overturned by his emotions,” that is, that God is in control or sovereign over his emotions. In sum, Carson argues, “we may usefully speak of God's being ‘impassable.’ But never should we succumb to the view that God is exclusively cerebral, utterly without emotions.” In view of this definition, humans are easily swayed by their emotions, whereas God is sovereign over His emotions.

[44] Carson, How Long O Lord?, 167

[45] Bruce A. Ware, God’s Greater Glory: The Exalted God of Scripture and the Christian Faith (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), 146.

[46] Vanhoozer suggests, “Perhaps the Bible’s depiction of divine suffering is less a matter of anthropopathic projection than it is a case of human suffering being theopathic (God-like).” (Remythologizing Theology, 77-78). This is an interesting proposal that is made. Still, it does mistakenly begin with God being like us rather than man being like God thereby forming a version of idolatry where God is made in the image of man rather than man being made in the image of God.

[47] a’ Brakel, Christian’s Reasonable Service, 1:101.

[48] James E. Dolezal, All That Is In God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage books, 2017), 20-21.

[49] Dolezal, “Strong Impassibility,” 34.

[50] Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, I:837. 

[51] Thomas G. Weinandy, Does God Change? (Washington, D.C.: St. Bede’s,1985).

[52] Helm, “The Impossibility of Divine Passibility,” 138.

[53] Barrett, None Greater, 115.

[54] Ronni Kurtz, No Shadow of Turning: Divine Immutability and the Economy of Redemption, REDS (Glasgow: Mentor, 2022), 156.

[55] Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I:3.4.1.

[56] Karl Barth suggests that God is merely actual whereas classical theists, like Aquinas, affirm that God is purely actual. See Tyler Wittman, God and Creation in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 25 – 175.

[57] Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, I:834-835.

[58] Irenaeus, Against Heresies, II.12.1.

[59] Irenaeus, Against Heresies, II:13.3. “God as the Creator, for Irenaeus, is the one who truly is, for he brings all else into existence. As such, in accordance with the Hebrew Scriptures, he is both absolutely other than all else and simultaneously and immediately present to and active within creation. Because God is the one who truly is, unlike the changing order of creation, he is impassibly flawless and abidingly perfect in his passionate love.” (Weinandy, Does God Sufer?, 94)

[60] Jordan Cooper, The Doctrine of God: A Defense of Classical Christian Theism (Just & Sinner, 2023), 166.

[61] David Bently Hart, “Impassibility as Transcendence: On the Infinite Innocence of God” in The

Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in Theology and Metaphysics (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2017).

[62] Barrett, None Greater, 116.

[63] Barrett, None Greater, 123.

[64] Many of these arguments are against Jurgen Moltmann’s proposed suffering God in The Crucified God (Minneapolis, MI: Fortress, 1993) and The Trinity and the Kingdom (Minneapolis, MI: Fortress, 1993). Richard Bauckham summarizes Moltmann’s arguments for a suffering God in three ways: the passion of Christ, the nature of love, and the problem of human suffering. (“In Defense of The Crucified God” in The Power and Weakness of God. Ed. Nigel M. de S. Cameron. Edinburgh: Rutherford House Books, 1990), 93-99.

[65] Moltmann, Crucified God, 410.

[66] David Bently Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003), 160.

[67] Moltmann, The Crucified God,

[68] Moltmann, Trinity and the Kingdom, 22. White comments, “Moltmann sees the human death of Jesus as an event affecting the very being of God. Death and time enter into the very life and character of the Son as God. This also means that in the resurrection, the life of God overcomes death as part of God’s own history. If the Son suffers and dies, the Father grieves, and the Holy Spirit acts to give life again to Christ. Each person is differentiated by distinct natural attributes, sufferings, and engagements with the world.” (The Trinity, 295)

[69] “God is the wounded Lord, having pain in himself.” (Kaoh Kitamori)

[70] Moltmann, Trinity and the Kingdom, 32.

[71] Moltmann, The Crucified God,

[72] Moltmann, The Crucified God,

[73] Moltmann, Trinity and the Kingdom, 45.

[74] Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 34.

[75] Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 46.

[76] Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 28.

[77] Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 21.

[78] Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom, 60.

[79] Charles Hodge and B.B. Warfield suggest that God’s love should be regarded as emotional. See, Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, I:391-393, 428-329; B.B. Warfield, The Saviour of the World; Sermons Preached in the Chapel of Princeton Theological Seminary (New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1914), 261-262. See Paul Helm’s “B.B. Warfield on Divine Passion,” WTJ 69.1 (2007): 95-104.Divine love is not categorically an emotion or passion, as Hart highlights, “theologically speaking, at least according to the dominant tradition, love is not, in its essence, an emotion—a pathos—at all: it is life, being, truth, our only true well being, and the very ground of our nature and existence.” (Hart, “No Shadow of Turning,” 195) God’s love is not rooted in an emotional state but in His Triunity. That is, God’s love is fundamentally based on His relation with Himself rather than with humanity. Divine love is understood in Trinitarian terms. As Wellum writes, “Divine impassability positively affirms that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are impassable not because they are devoid of holy love but because they are constituted by their full actualized relations of holy love.” (Systematic Theology, 616)

[80] Barrett, None Greater, 123.

[81] Hart, No Shadow of Turning: On Divine Impassibility, 192.

[82] Dolezal, “Strong Impassibility,” 29. “In God, the divine act of love is identical with his pure and simple act of existence. It therefore admits of no greater or lesser intensity. We in this respect we should say God loves all his creatures with the exact same love. But with regard to the manifestation of that love there is diversity and disproportionality in the goods given to creatures, grounded in God's free will to distribute good as he pleases.” (32)

[83] Dolezal, “Strong Impassibility,” 30-31.

[84] Dolezal, “Strong Impassibility,” 28.

[85] R.B. Jamieson and Tyler R. Wittman, Biblical Reasoning: Christological and Trinitarian Rules for Exegesis (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2022), 88.

[86] Moltmann, The Crucified God.

[87] Moltmann, The Crucified God, 230.

[88] “Relationships demand them [feelings], and if we are in a relationship with God our Father, there must be something in him that can connect with us at the emotional level if the analogy with human relationships is to have any meaning. The differences between God’s nature and ours will put his feelings for us in their proper perspective but they will not eliminate them altogether, because they are eternally present in the Trintiy and were not created, but only manifested to us in the incarnation of the Son.” (Gerald Bray, A History of Christian Theology: A Trinitarian Approach. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2024), 1215.

[89] Bray, A History of Christian Theology, 1207. “Despite its comparative rarity in ancient pagan writing, the term ‘impassible’ was often used by Christians in their description of God—more often, in fact, than almost any other comparable word. This was not because the early Christians thought that God was stoic, or emotionally cold and indifferent to the human predicament. The term’s frequent use by the church fathers was counterbalanced by their equally common assertion that Christ had suffered and died for our sins.” (Gerald Bray, The Attributes of God: An Introduction, SSST (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 35.

[90] Gerald Bray argues that instead of using the word “dynamic” it is better to use the word “energetic.” .” He suggests, “An God is fully interactive with his creation without being subject to or dependent on it, and therefore he does not change because of his contact with it. An energetic God can and does meet us in our particular circumstances and engages with us in appropriate ways without losing his own transcendence in the process. Indeed, it is because he is energetic in this way that we can know that his power is always available to assist us. It will not fail us when we need him. In energetic God is flexible without being unpredictable or unreliable, and this is what we are after. This is the saving Lord who reveals himself to us in the Bible, and it is in this way that we should understand his relationship to us.” (God Is Love: A Biblical and Systematic Theology. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 152-153.

[91] Beeke and Smalley, Reformed Systematic Theology, I:833.

[92] B.R. Brasnett, The Suffering of the Impassible God (London: SPCK, 1928), ix.

[93] A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 351.

[94] For thorough treatments of the incarnation and impassibility see Steven J. Duby, Jesus and the God of Classical Theism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2020), 315-374; A.M. Fairbairn and Thomas Joseph White, Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2009).

Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, 172-286.

[95] Wellum, Systematic Theology, 617.

[96] Cooper, The Doctrine of God, 175.

[97] Horton, The Christian Faith, 245. He later cites G.A. Studder Kennedy who wrote, “God, the Father God of Love, is everywhere in history, but nowhere is he Almighty.” (The Hardest Part. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918).

[98] Barrett, None Greater, 136.