On Writing Poetry (or, Am I Really a Poet at All?)

("Florentine Poet," by Alexandre Cabanel, 1861)

I have a curious confession to make. Despite the fact that I have a major work of poetry about to be published by a large-scale, reputable publisher—a work I consider perhaps my most significant project to date—I hesitate to call myself a poet. And the nearer I get to publication, the more that hesitation curdles into something closer to nerves. It is a fairly safe thing to write poems in the quiet of your own study, where no one but you and God is in any position to judge them (or to post them on a blog that offers no avenue for leaving comments). It is another thing entirely to send them out into the world and wait to find out what the world thinks they are worth.

What makes someone a poet? I’ve been writing poetry for most of my life, but it has always been a side pursuit, and only intermittently. It has never been my main vocation, and maybe that’s part of my hesitation. It’s not the thing that comes first to mind when people think of me (those few who do!). I imagine most think of me primarily as a pastor, which I primarily am. A few rare souls might think of me as a theologian, a historian, a missiologist, or an author. But a poet? No. Robert Frost was known for his poetry; he was a poet. Edna St. Vincent Millay was known for her poetry; she was a poet. I don’t think the same is true of me.

But there’s a bigger reason why I hesitate to call myself a poet. It’s because it feels a little bit like I’m an outsider claiming an insider’s stake. I’ve never felt at home in the sensibilities of the literary world. Despite all my background in writing, I tended to avoid writing classes in college, and I never submitted poetry to the student journals in my day. The kind of poetry that poetry-inclined people appreciated was dark, raw, moody, and disjointed. It felt edgy and experimental in an artsy sort of way. My poetry was exactly the opposite: clear, articulate, and aiming at soaring grandeur. Even when I would write free verse, my poems would often end up leaning toward rhyme and meter, as if they were aspiring to ascend to a higher plane. To many literary-minded readers, I expect, this carried an air of not-quite-getting-it: rather like wandering through a modern art gallery and running into an artist still trying to sell 19^th-century landscapes.

There was something in the modern world of poetry that I just wasn’t getting. And yet, I also noticed that there was a curious dichotomy emerging—while I felt rather distant from the ethos of the literary world and the forms it valued, quite a few ordinary people seemed to enjoy my sort of poems. My art, whatever its deficiencies, was seen as accessible and useful. Though I hadn’t formally published any poems while in college, I was nevertheless called upon to write the responsive litany for our graduation service. The poetical aspects of liturgy and congregational song called to my gifts, and I was able to set them to good use there. Yet while quite a number of people have come to think my poetry charming and useful, there still remains a missing bridge of understanding yet to be built across the chasm between myself and the literati.

Given these things, when I write and publish my poems, there’s a secret fear that the people who really know poetry will think it’s not very good. Rhymed and metered poems have often been seen as passé, or at the very least sequestered to a few narrow niches (specifically, songwriting and children’s books). Poems of that sort can be wildly popular—looking at you, Dr. Seuss—but if Dr. Seuss tried to do the same with serious, literary poems, his works would likely have sat, dusty and ignored, in the “rejection” tray on an editor’s desk. Rhymed and metered poems, because of their current association with children’s verse, now sound childish to many people, despite the fact that many of the best poets in history employed the very same forms. And it’s true that such poems, when done poorly, feel cringingly amateurish. But when done well—think Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Longfellow—those carefully-structured poems rise to heights of elegance that nothing else can match. I don’t say this to claim that my own poems belong in that company; only that the form itself was never the disqualifying feature so many now assume it to be. But, regardless, the majority sensibility of the poetry world has moved on. My poems might have done well enough two centuries ago, but it’s not the early 1800s anymore. I just have to hold onto hope—and there are a few encouraging signs in this regard—that the pendulum may be starting to swing back the other way.

But why don’t I try to write edgy, experimental poems? Or poems that break open the ordinary container of form and pour themselves out into new and unexpected shapes? I can’t. It just isn’t in me.

But here I have to be careful, because there are two different objections tangled up in that question, and I don’t want to be found guilty of the one I don’t actually hold. It isn’t really the newness of the form that troubles me. Poets have always been breaking open old vessels to pour out new wine—Whitman did it in his own way, Hopkins did it in his own stranger and holier way, and for that matter so did the psalmists. The spirit that animates a poem can clothe itself in a great many forms, and I don’t doubt that it has, in hands more skilled than mine, found a true home in free verse and broken lines and all the rest.

What troubles me is something underneath the form: an atomized individualism that has made the poet’s own fractured experience the first and final subject of the poem, with no redemption offered and, all too often, none even sought. It isn’t the shape of the container I object to; it’s what so often fills it. A poem can be formless and still be full of grace, the way the Spirit moved over the formless waters before the world had any shape at all. And a poem can be perfectly metered and still be as empty as a whitewashed tomb. So when I say I can’t write the poems the literati prize, I don’t mean I’m unable to write in their forms—forms are just forms, and I’ve dabbled in more of them than I let on. I mean I can’t write from inside a posture that treats human brokenness as the final word, with no window left open for anything to come in from outside it. That might be the real distance between us.

Now, that sense of distance likely also owes a good deal to my own deficiencies in perception. But I think there’s something bigger at work here too, something that more than a few people have noticed in modern art galleries: there’s a note of anxious despair that has crept into the art world. There’s an emptiness there, a sad soullessness that only those who have experienced the fullness of grace can perhaps still recognize as such. The worlds of art and poesy, by and large, have lost something that once lay at the center of our highest works, and the lack of that something often makes the whole enterprise ring desperately hollow.

The great art of a Christian civilization—our paintings, music, architecture, and poetry—was not merely “original” in the way that modern art insists on atomistic originality. It was equally original and imitative, and it produced great works because what it was imitating was far grander than anything that any individual artist could produce. The refrain of the grace of God, full and vibrant and earth-shaking, echoed through every new wave of art and writing, pushing up cathedrals from the broad green fields of Europe, filling the halls of princes with unimagined symphonies, and setting forth words that danced, aflame with eternity, through the minds of readers. But then, when the modern world collectively decided to set the limitations of our own experience as the keystone of authentic art, our works gradually became a carnival hall of mirrors, reflecting back our brokenness in ever more distorted forms. (I’m painting with a broad brush here, and no doubt there are exceptions—but the overall sense of this portrait, I think, is recognizable to many.) For any who know the sweet fullness of grace, it’s hard to step fully inside those explorations of brokenness, at least not without a significant tinge of sadness—and not the sadness the artist intended to convey, but something deeper and more troubling: a lament for a civilization that cannot remember where beauty comes from, nor summon it back again.

All that to say: I can’t write those kinds of poems. Even poems about my own brokenness always end up throwing the windows open so that the grace of God can come streaming back in. Like David in the Psalms, I can’t bring myself to just quit the scene in the midst of all the wreckage without at least pointing toward the rising pathway that lies beyond. Why? To borrow the modern artist’s own language for a moment: because that’s actually what feels real to me. That’s my experience, unfiltered and authentic. Grace has the final word. But that, I think, may be part of the reason why my poetry, beyond all its other imperfections, will not be hailed as great. To those who have not shared my experience of grace, my tendency to include a perpetual shift toward redemption, toward seeking the resolution of a brighter ending beyond the chaos, will be seen as a weakness of my verse, not a strength.

So having addressed the spirit of the age, let me come back now to the question of form. I’ve gravitated ever more toward rhyme and meter for my own part, because when done well it bears an inherent movement and aspiration that echoes something far beyond its lines. To write a rhymed and metered poem is an act of faith that the world is intentionally structured, meticulously ordered, and beautiful in its design. Its cadence stirs something in us, reminds us of the intricate arrangement that forms the framework of our lives. I don’t say this to claim that rhyme and meter are the only forms capable of bearing such witness—clearly they aren’t, since Scripture itself sings in cadences our ears can barely track, and many poets have found other ways to make the shape of a poem preach its own small sermon. I say only that, for whatever reason of temperament or gift, rhyme and meter are the forms in which I feel the pull of that order most directly. Rhyme and meter call attention, gently and subtly, to the patterns by which the great Poet himself has written the story of our lives.

So it comes to this: I don’t hold out great expectations that my poetry will be appreciated as poetry, at least not by those whose business it is to judge such things professionally. And I say that not only because the values by which poems are judged are not always the values I choose to write toward, but because my poetry is quite probably not good enough, considered on its own, to make a masterpiece. If I’m honest, the comparison that keeps coming to mind these days isn’t Frost or Millay at all, but Thomas Kinkade—a painter beloved in a great many living rooms and almost nowhere in the galleries that decide what painting means. His canvases will probably never hang beside the ones the critics call great. But his paintings still light up a lot of ordinary rooms with a warmth their owners are glad to come home to, brightening the plain and honest hours of real people’s lives. I would be more than content if my poems did something like that: to hang, however modestly, on the wall of someone’s ordinary evening. I do hope (quite honestly and sincerely for all my self-doubting) that at least some people will find in my verse a deep and refreshing plunge into the heart of reality. I hope it will echo through hearts and minds not as something that calls my artistry to mind, but as something that orients the beholder toward the one true Artist.

So am I a poet? I suppose I could call myself that, nerves and all. But more important than the label is this: I am an apprentice in the Artist’s workshop. His is the true art, and mine the imitation—an imitation that, on its best days, draws attention back to him.

New Song: "Find Rest in Jesus"

As I posted in my recent update, I'm going to start getting back into writing original songs and hymns, to be posted on the second Friday of the month. This is my most recent song, which you can hear by clicking the YouTube lyric video above.

This song, "Find Rest in Jesus," draws on the frequent heart-cries of the Psalms, along with verses like Philippians 4:6-7 and 1 Peter 5:7.

The lyrics are my own original work (as are the photographs in the video background). The musical setting is also my work, assisted by online music generation tools. (While I would rather partner with real songwriters and musicians, my limitations as merely a lyricist leave me with few options in the absence of such partners, so in the meantime this will have to do.) You'll find the lyrics below; may they be a blessing.

Find Rest in Jesus

Find rest, my soul, in Jesus

Let Christ be your reprieve

Lean on his consolation 

And dwell within his peace

[Chorus] 

And the grace of God 

Will embrace your heart 

And give you peace again

Hallelujah

Lay down your fears before him

These worries that you bear

Pour out your pain to Jesus

Your cares to One who cares

[Chorus] 

Receive his boundless mercy

For you belong to him

Seek out his place of refuge

Find rest, and enter in

[Chorus]

Photography: Grand Canyon

How wonderful are your works, O Lord!

My soul knows it very well.

(adapted from Psalm 139:14)

 

Update - Publication and Blogging

The Evangeliad

Good news on my forthcoming book! The Evangeliad: The Gospel in Poetic Form is moving rapidly through the publication pipeline over at Resource Publications (Wipf & Stock). We're finalizing the typesetting for the interior proofs this week, and collecting endorsement quotes for the cover at the same time. Feedback has been really encouraging so far, so I'm pretty excited about this project. Here's a quick advance snippet from one of my endorsers, an Anglican bishop:

"The Evangeliad is a rare and radiant gift to the Church. Matthew Burden has taken the familiar story of Jesus and rendered it in a poetic form that feels both ancient and astonishingly new. These lines move with the cadence of Scripture, the tenderness of devotion, and the sweep of epic storytelling. As one who loves the Gospel and serves the people of God, I commend this work with joy. It invites the reader to slow down, breathe deeply, and behold Christ with renewed wonder. Burden’s craftsmanship honors the biblical text while opening a doorway into contemplation—an invitation to sit in the shade of beauty and let the story of Jesus speak again to the heart. My prayer is that The Evangeliad will enrich the devotional life of individuals, families, and congregations, drawing many into deeper love for the One whose glory shines through every page."

We don't have a release date yet for the manuscript, but I'll certainly post the date here once we know. If any of my blog-readers would like to serve as an "advance reader" for the manuscript (read a free digital copy first, and be ready to post an Amazon review as soon as the book goes public), please reach out to me at the contact info on my church's site (see the email address listed for me at the bottom of the webpage: www.calaisbaptist.org/contact). It's generally recommended that authors try to arrange for a few readers' reviews to go live on the publication date, as that really helps the book's Amazon algorithm. So if that sounds like something you'd like to do, just drop me a line.

Blogging

Good news, too, for longsuffering readers of my blog. With my busy slate of book-publishing receding in the rearview mirror, I'm actively planning to get back to the blog. Not at the scale of my old one-post-a-day schedule, but I'm committing to one post per week (usually on a Friday). I had contemplated migrating my account over to Substack to look cool and fashionable like all the other writers, but then I decided I don't care about that, so I'm sticking with the old functional web-dinosaur, Blogger, for the time being. One of the sacrifices of sticking with Blogger, though, is that there's no possibility of twisting my readers' arms into paid subscriptions for my writings (which, let's be honest, probably aren't worth a subscription). In lieu of that, and recognizing how very popular excessive tipping has become, I have included a button in the blog's sidebar (also accessible on the "Connect" page) to function as a little "tip jar" if anyone feels so inclined.

My plan, starting in July, is to leave aside the local-ministry videos and studies I've been putting up (those are still available from my church, just see the links on the bottom of this blog's "Resources" page), and to resume a regular posting schedule. On the first Friday of the month, I'll be putting up some of my nature photography, accompanied as always by a text from Scripture or liturgy for reflection; on the second Friday, I'll post a new original hymn; on the third Friday, a prose reflection or thinkpiece (possibly a new memoir-style series reflecting on the church); on the fourth Friday, a rough-draft selection from my new project, The Evangeliad: Acts of the Apostles. Yes, that's right, I'm going to do a second volume, even if no one but me and my friend the Anglican bishop ends up liking the first volume. These monthly Evangeliad posts will not represent the entirety of the new book's text, but sporadic selections. And as for what I'll post on those rare fifth Fridays of the month, well, that's anyone's guess. We'll see what comes up. And as readers of my blog know, there's always the off-chance that my brain will get running full-tilt down some random tangent here or there, which might end up producing excessively long blog articles even if it's not a Friday! So keep your eyes open, friends. I appreciate your support, and look forward to celebrating the grandeur of God together through the beauty of his creation and the written word.

New Book Release!

My new book comes out today! It continues my contributions to historical missiology (begun with my last book, Missionary Motivations), and looking this time at the major movements in both hymns and missions that developed in the 18th century. This book makes the case that a revolution in hymnody directly paved the way for the launch of the great Protestant mission movement. I'm posting links below to the book's page from both my publisher and Amazon, as well as a video interview about the book in case you're interested.

Book page on the publisher's website (click here)

Amazon.com book page (click here)

Holidays and Pagan Roots - Should We Celebrate Christmas?

Holidays and Pagan Roots (Full Handout)

Here's the video and a link to the handout for this week's Q & A study at my church. Unlike other weeks, where I've provided the handout text in the blog post itself, this time I'm just posting a link to the entire thing. The reason is that I went a little overboard, and the thing is 14 pages long. It not only breaks down the arguments around Christmas traditions, but it goes into Easter and Halloween too for good measure. A good resource, hopefully, but a little long for a blog post. Clicking the link should bring you to the document, where you can save a copy for yourself if you like.

On Understanding the Heart of God - Is the Classical View of Divine Impassibility True?

I had a recent series of discussions with my brother, also a pastor-theologian, and it prompted a long reflection on questions that most of us probably don't think about often, but which have loomed large in the traditions of Christian theology. It started with a discourse on the nature of time and eternity after Thanksgiving dinner (as is customary, I'm sure you'll agree), but it soon migrated into a reflection on the impassibility of God--the idea that God does not suffer change, including the changeability of emotions. If you're wondering how those two abstruse topics are connected, well, it turns out that if you're defending a position like mine, which prefers both to think of God as truly possessing emotion in the fullest sense, and also to think of God as eternal (that is, being completely beyond time), then that seems to imply that grief will be a part of God's experience forever--and this my dear brother (together with most of the greatest theologians of church history) found difficult to swallow.

It's only with fear and trembling that I dissent from a near-unanimous opinion of the early church fathers (and my brother), but on the impassibility of God, something in their position doesn't seem quite right. And I'm not alone in this--a significant swath of modern theologians, even in theologically conservative traditions, have dissented from the classical idea of the impassibility of God, or at least sought to seriously modify the way it's emphasized. Joining me on this side of the field, for instance, are modern theological heavyweights like Paul Fiddes (a Baptist theologian who taught at Oxford) and Pope Benedict XVI. 

Divine Impassibility

So let's back up a step. What's the classical view? Well, the early church fathers taught that God's ontological nature is absolutely unchangeable. It is undivided, which means that all his virtues and attributes are fundamentally united, never changing in their balance or consistency. That seems to follow from both Scripture and good sense, and this sensibility offers several important reassurances to the believer. If God is unchangeable, then he is indeed a rock-solid foundation for our trust. He is the same God he always was and always will be, forever faithful. But the early church fathers thought this unchangeability necessarily included another aspect: that God is completely above the changeability of emotions. He is not subject to passing moods, capricious whims, storms of wrath, or fickle loves. He does not suffer or experience grief. All of these things, they thought, would imply that God's nature can be influenced, acted upon, and pushed around by circumstances external to himself, which would impinge on his sovereign freedom and absolute self-sufficiency. If God can be influenced by his creatures in a way that moves him from what he was to some new state, then he is no longer the eternally reliable foundation of our hope--he is changeable. Or at least, that's what they thought.

Now, there's some nuance here. The fathers would be quick to point out that what we think of as emotion is a lesser reality, and the corollary features of God's character--those which parallel our emotions--are higher and fuller and richer than we can conceive. Therefore it is proper to speak of God's love, for instance, and even, as Scripture does, of his wrath, his grief, and so on. But in doing so, the fathers would say that we must not imagine any of these things as we typically do. God's love is not a yearning, pining, desiring love, as if God was somehow made vulnerable, able to be hurt or diminished by another's choice. Rather, God's love is not emotionally vulnerable at all, but is supremely self-sufficient and infinitely giving, always willing the good of the other. God is a fountainhead of love in this sense--always secure in his own beatitude, and always pouring forth his unchanging intent to save and to bless. Even God's wrath is really just a manifestation of his love (i.e., his intent to do good), refusing to allow sin and evil to hold sway and to further corrupt his creation. Further, impassibilists will emphasize that God's love was made manifest in a special way in the Incarnation, in which he united himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, to a passible human nature. In that human nature, the Son of God truly suffered, experienced grief, sorrow, and all the sweep of our emotions. But--and here's the crucial point--the Son of God did not experience any of that in his divine nature, which remained entirely serene, blissful, and unperturbed (because, remember--God can't be changed, even by the passion of emotions).

Okay, so that's the picture that the early church fathers, and all of classical theism, would give. And there's a lot to admire here. But if it feels somehow sneakily unsatisfying as an answer, there's good reason for that. 

Critique of the Impassibilist View

Think about the picture of God's love outlined above. It sounds really nice to describe it as always giving, characterized by the intent to do good, and so on. But if you think about it, that's not actually what we mean by love. We recognize all of those descriptions as characteristic of other virtues, like kindness, which are not generally thought of as higher, but as lower than genuine love. My love for my dog is characterized by the unchanging intent to do her good, but I don't love her as I love my children, for whom I make myself vulnerable at the deepest heart of who I am. Vulnerability is part of what we mean by love, and we intuitively recognize that as a higher form of love. A father who does not make himself vulnerable in love toward his children--who feels no pain at their rebellion, for instance--is not a particularly good father.

And if a classical theist would object here, "But that's exactly what God did do in the Incarnation--make himself vulnerable in the most unbelievable way possible!"--I would say, yes, absolutely! But when we look at the Passion of Jesus through an impassibilist lens, there are some quirks of the narrative that many Christians will find surprising. So much so, in fact, that an impassibilist appeal to the Passion can sometimes almost feel like sleight-of-hand. That's not to say that impassibilist scholars are trying to trick us, far from it--many admirably try to make the Incarnation the center of God's self-revelation of love (and properly so!), but the result often seems to come up with the same picture in the end: the Incarnation as a curious exception rather than the defining paradigm of a self-giving love that can, in fact, truly suffer for the sake of its love for humanity. In impassibilists' eyes, the divine nature does not change, and they read this to mean that it does not "feel" anything as we do--not even in the Passion of the Lord. God showed us his love in Jesus, yes--but the impassibilists end up having to portray that love as being bounded in this one limited historical episode, carefully boxed up inside Jesus's human nature but not touching his divine nature, or else God's unchanging nature could not be described as perpetually serene and unruffled. God's unchanging nature, you see, is still entirely invulnerable, even in the Passion. The Father feels no sorrow at the death of the Son, because the Father cannot feel sorrow--that would (it is thought) diminish him. To put it pointedly regarding your own condition before God: the impassibilist position is forced to insist that the Father feels no loss if you are lost, because the Father cannot feel loss. Sure, one might be able to say that God embraces our suffering in the crucifixion of Jesus, but even this appears to lose something of its meaning once we realize that the Father feels nothing of that suffering. In our relations with the Father, we do not experience the running embrace of the one who receives the prodigal home, but an infinitely unflappable Buddha in the heavens. In Jurgen Moltmann's incisive critique, he describes classical impassibility as showing God reigning serenely over Auschwitz. Is such a view really a higher view of God, or a lower one that rightly makes us shudder? One could easily imagine a great celestial machine that felt nothing and always sought the good of others--but would that be God? I think not.

So I'm not convinced by the classical argument for divine impassibility, and for three main reasons: 

First, I think there's a logical weak link in here, when we assume that the apparent changeability of emotions is somehow a threat to God's ontological impassibility. It's absolutely true that his nature and character do not change. But are the states we refer to as emotions really an element of ontological nature, or something else? I think what we refer to as "emotions" are actually images of his unchanging nature, which we see refracted in different aspects because in its relationality, it looks different when in contact with different aspects of our reality. If that sounds like another way of saying impassibility, it's really more like saying that emotion is a reflection of the fullness of God's character, not (as classic impassibility would have it) a mirage meant to point to something rather different than what we even mean by emotion.

Second, and more importantly, I'm also unconvinced because the view above, for all its philosophical appeal, seems to stand in direct contradiction to God's self-revelation in Scripture. God portrays himself as passionately emotional--so much so, at times, that it's a little over the top (just read Ezekiel and the minor prophets). One gets the sense that there is vibrancy in the emotional life of the Godhead that is well beyond what we experience. Nonetheless, classical impassibility reads these instances in Scripture as anthropomorphisms meant to aid our understanding--we are meant to learn something about God from these texts, but apparently not that he experiences emotion. I alluded to the parable of the Prodigal Son above. Doesn't it seem to be a very strange story for Jesus to tell, if he does not mean for us to understand from it (among other things) that the heart of God toward us is a yearning, desiring, even a grieving one? It is of course possible to reconcile the impassibilist position to Scripture by arguing that any "emotions of God" text must be interpreted as anthropomorphic analogies (and indeed, that's a very faithful, and sometimes necessary, way of reading those texts)--but the ubiquity of the emotional language ascribed to God, even in the teaching of Jesus, seems to leave one in a difficult spot. If I can put it crudely, one almost has to accept that God is a rather poor communicator in the way he has inspired his Scriptures, if he intended us to discern that he is beyond all emotion. 

Third, I'm unconvinced because impassibility seems to me to be a relic of the Platonism that reigned in the philosophical circles in which the early church fathers lived and worked. It's an idea that predates Christianity, and it's also an idea that is calibrated to respond to a particular context: the capriciously whimsical, over-emotional gods of the pagan pantheon. One might expect such influences to push the classical view of God in a wide pendulum-swing in the opposite direction, which is what I think has largely happened here. Now, to be clear, that's not a full argument in itself. There are many parts of pre-Christian Greek philosophy which I embrace wholeheartedly and which, I think, are a good match for Scripture--the eternality of God being one. But the context in which ideas grow is important, and knowing this context should give us at least some pause. (And to the contrary objection, that my perspective arises from the post-Romantic context of modern Western sentimentality, well, let's just say I have some good books from the medieval mystics I can lend you which will disabuse you of that notion fairly quickly.)

My Position

So I don't buy classic impassibility. But neither does my position swing all the way to the other end, in which God is characterized by wild swings of passion and emotion. There are some middle grounds here, but they're tough to wrap our minds around. I'm actually arguing for one of the middle grounds--the ontological impassibility of God's nature, but with the sovereignly volitional vulnerability that the fullness of his love necessarily includes.

Let me go back to the nature of emotion as a refracted reflection of God's own nature, as it relates to our changing experiences. We have names for a wide variety of emotional states, some of which, according to Scripture, apply to God (love, anger, grief, etc.) and some of which don't (embarrassment, shame, despair and so on)--the latter naturally do not directly relate to God because they are, in fact, a manifestation of our imperfection and sin. Even those latter emotions, though, are pointers to the nature of God in their own way. Such emotions betray a recognition that we are not who we ought to be. We have a deep-seated desire to be holy and perfect--and so, in a roundabout way, even those emotions are refracted reflections of God's own nature, since he is holy and perfect and calls us to be so as well. But what about the ones that do directly apply to God? I would argue that they are all part of the fundamental unity of God's character, best understood as love--real, authentic, self-giving, and, yes, vulnerable love. Such love does manifest as wrath when the good of its beloved is threatened (as by sin). Such love does manifest as grief when its beloved is lost. But this doesn't make wrath or grief or sorrow or any of those things definitive of the character of God in a total sense--they are manifestations of his fundamental, unchanging love as it interacts with our changing circumstances, and it is love that defines God's character.

Does this entail, then, that God can feel loss (in an emotional sense, or at least something meaningfully analogous to our emotions)? Yes. But that does not mean that God is ontologically diminished in any way, merely that in his sovereign volition, he has made his heart vulnerable to us in love. The loss inherent in that love is not a sign of diminishment, but rather a sign of the fullness of his love. If it were not capable of loss, it would be a lesser form of love--and that would be an ontological diminishment, which is the very thing the impassibilists are trying to avoid. As argued above, a love that includes no possibility of grief or loss is easily recognized in our experience as a substandard sort of love--one that is unwilling to extend itself meaningfully to the other.

So does this mean that grief and sorrow are forever part of the heart of God (if we can even express it like that)? I think we have to say yes. The cross is the central movement in history, the one great visible sign of God's love, and if it means what it appears to mean, then it means that God's love is so vast that he has accepted sorrow and grief and loss into his very heart, all out of the vastness of his love for us. And again, I think it's a mistake to believe that ascribing a sense of emotional loss to God is a diminishment of God. To me, the opposite view would be the diminishment--a God whose love can only run in one direction, a love which does not really care for the other to the degree that it can be affected by the other.

Responding to Objections

Now, one cannot build one's argument only on intuitions about what love ought to be like--nevertheless, it may be instructive to note once again that these intuitions, over against the impassibility perspective, seem to match the way Jesus depicts the Father's heart, as in the Prodigal Son parable mentioned above. If our intuitions match the tone and tenor of Scripture, then it should take more than mere philosophical plausibility to overturn them. So let's examine a little more closely the impassibilists' causes for concern at my argument, to see if there are perhaps further considerations to which we should give due attention. Many impassibilists would think that my argument--in which sorrow and grief in some sense become an eternal part of the experience of God--is problematic, not least because it seems to suggest that God's beatitude can be diminished, making his "fullness of joy" dependent on creatures rather than on his own self-sufficient infinity. 

But I'm not sure this is a cogent response, for three reasons. First, it tends to use terms most closely tied to emotional states--beatitude, bliss, joy, happiness--as something proper to God, when the whole argument has been about denying the coherence of applying such states to God. How can one speak of God's joy or happiness at all, if God does not experience emotion in any form approaching what we understand emotion to be? Aren't those also anthropomorphisms according to the impassibilist line? I think the best we could do is to define impassible beatitude as "self-sufficient serenity." Maybe to some that's a greater good than genuine love, but to my ears that idea strikes more of a Buddhist chord than a Christian one. 

Second, I believe the response above also mischaracterizes my argument, by amplifying such things as grief and sorrow to an overriding and independent identity of their own, when my case posits that they are, in fact, merely sub-aspects of God's love. It is God's love that is forever full, and since the fullest form of love includes the possibilities of grief and sorrow, then yes, they are included here too--but that simply means that God's love is the richest it can possibly be. They are a part of his love, not something to be considered separately. Ask any parent who has loved a child and lost them whether it would have been better never to have loved that child, and, aside from perhaps the most extreme exceptions, you will get a unanimous response back: as Tennyson noted, it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. That's the question about God's love--does he love in that way--a love vast enough to embrace perpetual loss, counting the beloved worthy even of that--or is it something a little more limited, like perpetual kindness?

Third, let's tackle the question of joy, even if it is an emotional term (it just happens to be one of the emotional terms impassibilists like to use, so it's fair game). Does the God's love-grief necessarily diminish the fullness of God's joy? I don't think so. While it's admittedly hard for us to simultaneously hold together the emotional states of joy and grief (and thus hard to imagine what that would be like for God in the eternal state), experience teaches us that grief is very often the place from which the richest joy of all can bloom, either by a contrast which has deepened its meaningfulness (like the joy at the end of The Lord of the Rings) or by direct result (like the joy made possible by the grief of the cross). One could argue, in fact, that in our experience, grief and sorrow act as amplifiers of joy rather than diminishers of it, particularly if--in the words of Chesterton--grief is something "special and small" in comparison to the joy that results from the fullness of God's love. To use an everyday example, you could put it this way: like the sharpness of cheese beside a slice of apple pie, grief can accompany joy in a way that magnifies the whole. Further, we have to be careful not to instrumentalize the idea of grief as something that can act upon God apart from his will, as if it were stronger than him. The grief we're talking about is simply part of the unfathomably great love that God has chosen to express, so it is he, in his sovereign volition--not the grief--that has the mastery here. Grief does not act upon God as an external influence; God embraces this love-grief of his own accord. Now, this is probably all just an intuitional response, but we'll leave it at that--I simply don't see that God choosing to sing a melody of vaster love, one which entails a counterpoint of grief, is a necessary diminishment of his beatitude or joy. Rather, it just makes for a better symphony in the end.

But we still need to wrestle with the concomitant objection, that this all somehow makes God dependent on his creatures. If his emotional state, like joy or grief, is contingent upon external forces, a response to our actions--put another way, if it is something about himself that is shaped by others rather than himself--doesn't that shake the doctrine of his self-sufficiency, his supreme independence? Here the insights of Fiddes and others serve us well: this apparent vulnerability in God comes down to his own sovereign choice. It is his eternal, volitional act to become passible to us, to allow his heart to be moved by our choices. Nothing is taken from him; he lays it down of himself--and again, all of this redounds to the fullness of God's love. This is an expansive vision of the divine economy, and one that entails no ontological diminishment within the nature of God. 

God's Love as Maximal Perfection and Sovereign Volition

As I turn these things over in my mind, I keep coming back to the idea of God as the maximally perfect Being--the one whom, in Anselm's words, "nothing greater can be conceived." When we think of God's virtues as perfections, we usually imagine them by way of analogy, thinking of human virtues exalted and purified to their highest possible forms. To be maximally merciful is to exhibit mercy (which we know by its imperfect human expressions) in every applicable circumstance and in the fullest possible way. To be maximally just is to exhibit justice (which we also know by its imperfect human expressions) in every applicable circumstance and in the fullest possible way. In the same way, to be maximally loving is to exhibit love in a way that exceeds the highest forms of human love, not in a way that flips the human scale upside down. But love in the mode of classic impassibility appears to be the sort of love one might feel for a farm animal--always willing the other's good, but not the sort of vulnerable, passionate love one feels for a child. If we are to imagine God as the perfection of love, we must imagine this is as the perfection of what we mean by love--an even higher amplification, reaching perfection, of the highest forms of love we know, not a weird transmutation of something we would recognize as a lesser form of love, or mere kindness. Otherwise, we don't really mean that God is love; we mean something else, and we should choose a different word. The impassibilist view is a near enough fit for the God of Islam (in which, notably, God is not typically depicted as loving), but I'm just not convinced that it's a good fit for the God of the Christian gospel. 

To go back to the early church fathers--there were a few, if only a few, that verged slightly toward the case I'm presenting here (even if the vast majority went the other way). Origen--from whom Benedict XVI borrows for some of his view on the matter--was more willing to speak of God's emotions than were other patristic writers. And Maximus the Confessor--whose argument matches some of Fiddes's modern position--argues that the divine nature did actually, in a very real way, join itself eternally to the suffering and grief of the human nature of Christ, by a volitional choice. For Maximus, God's grief that I may be lost is an aspect of his love for me, eternally chosen out of his sovereign freedom in his act of creating me. So while Maximus might not portray God as always "feeling" that loss in the way we humans do, he would say that the grief of my loss is an eternal part of his love for me, freely and sovereignly chosen from before the world began. In this sense, then, any such grief is not enacted upon God by an external force; it is actively chosen by his own sovereign will.

Conclusion

Now, to be clear: in all humility, I'm really not sure I'm right on this. I'm just trying to give voice to my intuitions on the subject, as shaped by Scripture and instructed by the best logic my mind can follow. But we're talking about things that are far beyond our understanding, and it might very well be the case that the old classical view is a little more accurate than my way of putting it, and that I'm just misunderstanding the incomprehensible grandeur of the nature of God. Totally possible. But I think that's okay. I'm pretty sure I'm not giving in to mere modern mushiness or sentimentality, as impassibilists will sometimes impugn those who dare to disagree. My view hews close to Scripture and it shows up throughout church history far before "modern sentimentality" arises--just read Julian of Norwich for a clear view of a God characterized by a love so immense that it can only be understood in divine yearning and self-chosen suffering. 

For me, it comes down to a question of who I am going to worship. Either of the views above is permissible in Christian orthodoxy, but I must worship God according to the highest possible conception I can hold of him. And for me, that's a God of genuine love--the Father of the prodigal son. Until my conceptions and intuitions change, I must worship that God, because to my eyes, he is higher in love than the God of the impassibilists. He is more maximally perfect, and so he alone deserves my praise. (This is, incidentally, one of the reasons why I also prefer the classic view of the eternality of God--I feel like I can conceive of a greater Being than one which is limited to temporal sequence, and so to be maximally perfect God would have to transcend the limitations of time.) I'm not going to give my worship to something that seems to me to be inferior to another, greater Being. I hope and expect that God, in his mercy, accepts the highest worship I can possibly give, even if I (as is certainly the case) do not fully understand the scope of his nature.