God is impassible?????What the……

Classic theism teaches that God is impassible — not subject to suffering, pain, or the ebb and flow of involuntary passions. In the words of the Westminster Confession of Faith, God is “without body, parts, or passions, immutable.”

The doctrine of impassibility is inexorably tied to the doctrine of immutability, where It seems that a God who feels emotion must be a God who changes. To respond to situations with appropriate emotions, God must experience ups and downs, he must change. If, as the doctrine of divine immutability holds, God cannot change, then God cannot feel emotions. It may be argued against this that God might timelessly feel emotions, that he could be happy or sad from eternity to eternity. This, though, hardly captures the common understanding of a God with a rich emotional life.

Impassibility and Perfection

Divine impassibility is associated with divine perfection. A God who feels emotion is a God who can be caused to suffer by things outside himself. If god gets upset when things don’t go well, then he is vulnerable, he can be hurt. This has traditionally been thought to demean God, to suggest that he is less than he might have been. To preserve divine perfection, therefore, and particularly his invulnerability, divine impassibility has been suggested.

There is, however, a school of thought diametrically opposed to this. Instead of holding that God’s perfection entails that God doesn’t feel emotion, it has been argued, God’s perfection entails that he does. A God who can look down on the state of the world and not be moved, a God that can see suffering without feeling compassion or pain, it has been argued, is inferior to one who does. Better for God to be vulnerable than unconcerned. Better for him to be passible than impassible.

For this reason, divine impassibility, though one of the traditional doctrines of classical theism, is not a core part of modern theism. Some theists continue to hold that God is impassible, but most laypersons at least think of God as weeping when we weep, and rejoicing when we rejoice, as being emotionally involved with his Creation and his creatures.

Process theologians have recently started promoting themselves as relational theologians, at first I had an issue with this but as i have delved deepr into what process is about, I think the re-branding is entirely appropriate and about time. What has this to do with impassibility and immutability? I am glad you asked.

The idea of a remote unfeeling and unchanging God is not only repugnant but at odds with scripture. The Old and New Testaments give more than a few examples of God’s intervemtion in the history of humainty with the most outstanding intervention being the incarnational Christ.

Do not make the mistake that many evangelicals make and confuse God’s will in requiring our participation with some sort of dependence by God on humanity that is simply not the case.

This will be continued , stay tuned.

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Filed Under: Relational Theology