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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) always 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 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.