Divine Impassibility
That God is in “process” is a basic foundational assumption in modern theology. Being in a process, or, in other words, a subjective experience that passes from one limited state to another, is thought to be the very essence of personhood. But it may also be that the existentialist’s explicit maxim that “existence precedes essence” was already being read back into the divine. In this way, God could be whatever we wanted him to be; or if we prefer to think more conservative thoughts of ourselves: God could be whatever he wanted to be. Of course both “wantings” imply that a personal God must be able to become and not simply be.
Defining Impassibility
The word “impassible” comes from the Latin for suffering (passio). Consequently, divine impassibility would be that essence of God that cannot suffer. Again we experience a chasm of language between the classical world and ours. We have already run into the idea that God must have the origin of “motion in himself,” yet he himself cannot be subject to motion. Since it had already been established that God is the Prime Mover, whatever this “motion” is, would be better understood as the Pure Act also demonstrated. So think of the difference between the concepts, “active” and “passive,” and we can see how this situates emotion.
In saying that God values, prefers, and chooses one thing over another, it does not follow that God must react to the enemies of that thing in order to have a particular stance to it. Our creaturely experience of value is of discovery. Our experience of choice is of limitation. And so naturally our experience of feeling will be of the kind of passion that is entirely affective potentiality: that is an external impress upon our hearts of some good thing that we lack or lost, or some bad thing that we fear or by which we are harmed.
Definition and testimony will have to overlap here because of how difficult the objections needlessly make this doctrine. Let me quote two theologians on how the early church fathers understood divine impassibility. First, from his book, Does God Suffer? Thomas Weinandy writes, “For the Fathers, to deny that God is passible is to deny of him all human passions and the effects of such passions which would in any way debilitate or cripple him as God. Thus, to say that God is impassible is again to ensure and to accentuate his perfect goodness and unalterable love” [1]. Then to one of the great Patristic scholars of the modern era, G. L. Prestige:
It is clear that impassibility means not that God is inactive or uninterested, not that he surveys existence with Epicurean impassibility from the shelter of a metaphysical isolation, but that his will is determined from within instead of being swayed from without. It safeguards the truth that the impulse alike in providential order and in redemption and sanctification come from the will of God [2].
Divine impassibility is taught in Scripture. For example, “God is love” (1 Jn. 4:8)—not simply that God has love in the sense of experiencing a possession of it, but rather an “everlasting love” (Jer. 31:3). And He is “a God who feels indignation every day” (Ps. 7:11). Unlike beings who may gain and lose and yet still be, for God to be love and simply to be are one and the same. This is an early clue that impassibility, far from denying the living God, is the raging fountain of all that we call feeling.
The impassibility of God had certainly been the testimony of the early church, the medieval church, and the Protestant Scholastics and Puritans retained it. Anselm argued that, “when we state that God undergoes some lowliness or weakness, we understand this to be in accordance with the weakness of the human substance which he assumed [in incarnation], not in accordance with the sublimity of his impassible [divine] nature” [3]. Calvin commented on the “repentance” of God of what he would have done in those human repentance texts, that in special revelation, God,
accommodated to our capacity so that we may understand it. Now the mode of accommodation is for him to represent himself to us not as he is in himself, but as he seems to us. Although he is beyond all disturbance of mind . . . whenever we hear that God is angered, we ought not to imagine any emotion [i.e., passion] in him, but rather to consider that this expression has been taken from our own human experience [4].
Objections to Impassibility
Here we run directly into all of the sensibilities of modern theology. At the extremes are Process and Open Theism. But it was Karl Barth that articulated the emotive life of God that God is nevertheless Lord over. So he wrote with great subtlety,
The personal God has a heart. He can feel and be affected. He is not impassible. He cannot be moved from the outside by an extraneous power. But this does not mean that He is not capable of moving Himself. No, God is moved and stirred, yet not like ourselves in powerlessness, but in His own free power, in His innermost being: moved and touched by Himself [5].
J. I. Packer also attempted to honor the classical attribute, but with this proviso. Theologians “mean not that he is impassive and unfeeling, but that what he feels, like what he does, is a matter of his own deliberate, voluntary choice and is included in the unity of his infinite being. God is never our victim in the sense that we make him suffer where he had not first chosen to suffer” [6]. Note the difference between how Packer said that, as opposed to Prestige’s statement: “that his will is determined from within instead of being swayed from without.” Both are saying that God’s emotive, valuative, and volitional life come from within God’s eternal life, but Prestige fences that off to any ad extra causation, including subsequent, divinely chosen, ad extra causation.
To hear a voice inside of the Process Theology camp, Charles Hartshorne used the example of the parent-child relationship, and different scenarios of discipline that would be morally praiseworthy and blameworthy, a parent who is utterly indifferent lacking love more than any. He then concludes, “Yet God, we are told, is impassive and immutable and without accidents, is just as he would be in his actions and knowledge and being had we never existed, or had all our experiences been otherwise” [7].
There are passages of Scripture that certainly appear to show God experiencing emotions as any other person. The classical theologian would again appeal to the use of anthropomorphism.
God was sorry that he had made man (Gen. 6:6).
For the Lord was moved to pity by their groaning because of those who afflicted and oppressed them (Judg. 2:18).
[God] became impatient over the misery of Israel (Judg. 10:16).
In all their affliction he was afflicted (Isa. 63:9).
“You shall say to them this word: ‘Let my eyes run down with tears night and day, and let them not cease, for the virgin daughter of my people is shattered with a great wound, with a very grievous blow” (Jer. 14:17).
But the same objection can be raised on a philosophical plane. It is not simply the notion of change when it comes to creation or Incarnation. Every time the disposition of God is seen to change in relation to another personal agent, it would seem that not only is there a change in God, but a change in personal disposition at that. Charnock answers this—and notice how he utilizes the same in se versus ad extra breakdown we have been seeing throughout.
The unchangeableness of God, when considered in relation to the exercise of his attributes in the government of the world, consists not in always acting in the same manner, however cases and circumstances may alter; but in always doing what is right and in adapting his treatment of his intelligent creatures to the variation of their actions and characters. When the devils, now fallen, stood as glorious angels, they were the objects of God’s hatred, because impure. The same reason which made him love them while they were pure made him hate them when they were criminal [8].
The clearest expression of the problem comes from twentieth century theologian, Jürgen Moltmann:
A God who cannot suffer is poorer than any man. For a God who is incapable of suffering is a being who cannot be involved. Suffering and injustice do not affect him. And because he is so completely insensitive, he cannot be affected or shaken by anything. He cannot weep, for he has no tears. But the one who cannot suffer cannot love either. So he is a loveless being. Aristotle’s God cannot love; he can only be loved by all non-divine beings by virtue of his perfection and beauty, and in this way draw them to him. The “unmoved Mover” is a “loveless Beloved” [9].
But perhaps the clearest we find in classical theology of the whole dilemma was offered by Tertullian:
These sensations in the human being are rendered just as corrupt by the corruptibility of man’s substance, as in God they are rendered incorruptible by the incorruption of the divine essence. . . . [I]t is palpably absurd of you to be placing human characteristics in God rather than divine ones in man, and clothing God in the likeness of man, instead of man in the image of God [10].
There is the historical objection, which ultimately amounts to the same. But here the emphasis is on the origin of the ideas: which incidentally always opens itself up to the genetic fallacy. As one author writes, “Process theologians are well aware that Christian theology shares its vocabulary of being (ousia, physis) with Platonic philosophy, with which it is very closely linked at the most crucial period of its classical development. They also know that in Platonism the absolute being is static, since part of its perfection is the freedom to dwell in uninterrupted tranquility … without any danger that this might be disturbed. Furthermore, it is clear that many of these ideas were incorporated into Christianity, particularly the belief that God is free from suffering, or impassible (apathes), and that they appear to be unbiblical in certain respects” [11].
Now a genetic fallacy really is guilty as charged if the idea can stand on its own (x source or not), whether the idea in question is valid and sound or not. The question is, therefore, not whether or not the early church fathers “learned x” from Plato, but rather, whether the idea is true. The objection presupposes, up front, either that x cannot be true if uttered both by the Scripture and by a pagan. The burden of proof is on the critic to tell us why that is the case. The bottom line to both the philosophical objection and the same thing with historical garb, is that it is, in a word, philosophical (and not at all biblical or historic), as Weinandy echoes in his book:
Contemporary theologians have not come to the Bible and the Fathers philosophically neutral, but rather already convinced that an impassible and immutable God will not do. Thus, their interpretation of the Old Testament and the Fathers is driven, at least in part, by an already preconceived understanding of the philosophical issues involved and the philosophical answers that must be given [12].
Implications of Impassibility
Remember the formal argument with respect to immutability. Let us extend that same logic to the impassible.
All that is in God is God.
All that is in the divine Person(s) is God.
All that is in the divine Person(s) is immutable.
To have passions (or to suffer) is to experience change.
∴ No experience of passion (or to suffer) is in God.
In human beings, there is a distinction and even division between the emotive disposition (say, anger) and the exercise out of that emotion (righteous indignation or unrighteous anger). This is not so in God. As one theologian has noted, “while it may be helpful to think of God’s emotions as dispositions, unlike human beings, we should always keep in mind that God’s moral traits are both essential to him and never having division between the disposition and the exercise of it. These dispositions are maximally active and exercised without any limitation or conditionality” [13].
Scripture reveals the difference between the disposition and the exercise because our concern is not to ponder the simplicity of God alone at every point. Our business is in learning to love what God loves and hate what God hates, and so Scripture reveals the divine approval and disapproval at an active point in historical narrative so that we can view the moral line between God’s disposition and the moral action in the narrative. But should we call these perfections in God “emotions” at all?
One scholar writes, “God’s repentance is not an emotion of his Being but a change of treatment towards mankind from a human point of view. Thus, as to God’s love and all other emotions—jealously, hate, etc., we then must say that they are an analogy of our emotion”[14]. Paul Helm even coins the term “Themotion” [15], combining the Greek word for “God” and the suffix that speaks of motion, but is careful to say no more than would already be affirmed by actus purus.
If the divine essence is impassible, then it is the human nature of Christ that suffers on the cross. This opens up a further difficulty—though we must remember Thomas’ distinction between demonstration and difficulty!—and that is the sense in which a human nature can suffer what seems to be an infinite punishment for an infinite crime, since the orthodox would grant that the wrath and curse of God far transcended the physical sufferings of the historical crucifixion.
The full answer must wait for our doctrine of the atonement. Yet a partial answer can be given in pointing out that a fallacy of equivocation has been developed in our use of the word “infinite” to describe the nature of both crime and punishment. This uncritical use of that idea is then imposed, unwittingly no doubt, upon the limitations of a human being in time and space, and thus we imagine a contradiction to our terms that need not apply to the reality in question.
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1. Thomas G. Weinandy, Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), 111.
2. G. L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: SPCK, 1969), 7.
3. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo,
4. Calvin, Institutes 1.17.13
5. Barth, Church Dogmatics, II.1.30.2
6. Packer, Concise Theology (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1993), 29.
7. Hartshorne, Divine Relativity, 43.
8. Charnock, Existence and Attributes of God,
9. Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 222.
10. Tertullian, Marc. 2.16 (ANF 3); cf. Weinandy, Does God Suffer, 102.
11. Gerald Bray, The Doctrine of God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 56.
12. Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, 84.
13. Amos Winarto Oei, “The Impassible God Who ‘Cried,’” Themelios, Vol. 41. No. 2, Aug. 2016
14. Oei, “The Impassible God Who ‘Cried,’”
15. 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), 140.
