God Is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion

by Rob Lister, Bruce A. Ware (Foreword by)

Overview

The doctrine of divine impassibility has sparked much controversy among modern theologians. After reviewing relevant historical, biblical, and theological issues, Lister proposes an understanding of God as fundamentally impassible and yet profoundly impassioned.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781433532412
Publisher:	Crossway
Publication date:	11/30/2012
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Rob Lister (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is associate professor of biblical and theological studies at the Talbot School of Theology. His primary research interests include theology proper, christology, and sanctification—all of which are fused together at the hub of his book on divine impassibility. He and his wife, LuWinn, have four children.

Bruce A. Ware (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is T. Rupert and Lucille Coleman Professor of Christian Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He has written numerous journal articles, book chapters, and book reviews, and is the author of God's Lesser Glory and God's Greater Glory.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Impassibility

What's in a Name?

The SS hanged two Jewish men and a youth in front of the whole camp. The men died quickly, but the death throes of the youth lasted for half an hour. "Where is God? Where is he?" someone asked behind me. As the youth still hung in torment in the noose after a long time, I heard the man call again, "Where is God now?" And I heard a voice in myself answer: "Where is he? He is here. He is hanging there on the gallows."

So began a powerful plea for belief in a suffering God in the wake of the twentieth century's icon of injustice and wickedness. The prose is riveting. The historical referent of the Holocaust is haunting. And insofar as it bears on the specific concerns of this study, the theology informing this famous quotation represents a seismic shift in the modern theological appraisal of the doctrine of divine impassibility.

The Issue

Interestingly, in this quotation of Jürgen Moltmann, in which he is adapting an account from Elie Wiesel's Night, it appears that Moltmann may well have departed from Wiesel's original sentiments. What is quite clear, though, is that Moltmann himself commends to his readers the theology of a suffering God. Though we will parse out the details more precisely as we progress, it suffices for now to say that in the world of academic theology, an affirmation of divine suffering is typically known as a belief in divine passibility. Divine passibility in turn is, quite obviously, the antithesis of divine impassibility, the view that, in some importantsenses at least, God transcends (i.e., cannot be afflicted with) suffering. The shift in thinking on this matter in modern theology truly has been seismic. Whereas up to the modern era the church could be widely characterized as affirming some notion of divine impassibility, modern theology has broadly rejected the former consensus and championed divine passibility in its place. As a consequence, we have, in the words of Ronald Goetz, witnessed "the rise of a new orthodoxy."

Part of the reason for this dramatic doctrinal overhaul in modern theology is that many contemporary passibilists have (mistakenly, I will argue) taken divine impassibility to mean that God has no emotional capacity and no interest in his creation. Hastings Rashdall, for example, criticizes the Patristic and scholastic affirmations of impassibility as being endorsements of a God who is "cold, passionless, and loveless." Perhaps even more starkly, Vincent Tymms claims that the God of impassibilism is nothing more than an "infinite iceberg of metaphysics."

As it is fleshed out in theological argument, contemporary passibilists have advanced a number of reasons for abandoning the impassibilism of earlier centuries. As they see it, impassibilism is to be chided for (1) dismissing the straightforward readings of numerous biblical texts that powerfully display divine passion, (2) failing to take the love of God and, thus we are told, the possibility of meaningful relationship with God seriously, (3) failing to take the incarnation and cross seriously, and (4) failing to take the problem of evil and suffering seriously. Broadly speaking, then, passibilism is inclined to see impassibilism as failing to uphold the proper balance of divine transcendence and immanence, in that it overemphasizes the former to the neglect of the latter.

Though impassibilists may find themselves in a minority position in more recent history, they nevertheless have attempted to defend their own views and the views of their tradition with what they believe to be suitable responses. Thus, impassibilists have countered the passibilist charges with claims that (1) the theological method undergirding much passibilist exegesis is simplistic and (2) in their attempt to take the love of God, relationship with God, the incarnation and cross of Christ, and the problem of evil seriously, passibilists are often either reductionistic or extrabiblical themselves. In a broad sense, then, impassibilism is inclined to see passibilism as failing to uphold the proper balance of divine transcendence and immanence, in that it overemphasizes the latter to the neglect of the former.

My purpose in this book is to address this seeming theological impasse. Upon concluding the historical and biblical investigations, I will offer my own explanation as to how both divine impassibility and divine impassionedness, when rightly understood, can and must go together. As we will see, this conclusion aligns, in principle, with the best of the impassibility tradition in terms of this juxtaposition of themes, even as I attempt to develop and expand a bit upon this foundation. Before proceeding any further, however, we should give some attention to the important matter of the terminology involved in this debate.

Definitional Factors Related to Impassibility

While the basis for the definition of impassibility will have to be demonstrated in the chapters providing historical analysis, it bears frontloading this project with some preliminary definitional comments in order to provide the basic framework necessary to enter the discussion.

Impassibility in Early Christian Thought

We may begin our remarks by expanding a bit on the observation that when compared with the early church, many modern theologians reflect a deep divergence with the tradition, not only in their evaluation of divine impassibility, but also in their basic understanding of what divine impassibility is thought to mean in the first place. Marc Steen has captured the force of this point nicely.

"Apathy" as it used to be understood, is not necessarily identical to what is understood by it now. In the first systematic text treating our topic, namely, in the Gregory Thaumaturgus' third-century treatise addressed to Theopompus, we are informed that a loving God must be "impassible." Nowadays the reverse reasoning is in vogue: if God is love, then He must be "passible." A misunderstanding of this conceptual difference leads to a veritable tower of Babel. Fighting traditional theism at the present time as if it introduced the notion of an "apathic," that is a cool and indifferent God, often seems to be a battle like Don Quixote's. It is, in any case, necessary to recognize that the term "(im)passibility" does not always and everywhere have one and the same connotation.

It is hard to overstate the importance of this point. To put it bluntly, both ancient advocates and contemporary critics of divine impassibility use the same terminology, but they often mean quite different things when they explain what it means for God to be impassible.

Whereas we have already seen that contemporary passibilists have frequently asserted that the doctrine of divine impassibility conveys God's absence of emotion, the most representative statements of the classical tradition do not, in fact, assert God's indifference to and aloofness from creation, nor do they claim that God was devoid of vibrant affection. Rather, in the main, the classical tradition simply sought to preserve the notion that, as the self-determined sovereign, God is not subject to emotional affects that are involuntarily or unexpectedly wrung from him by his creatures. As we will see further on, this dimension of God's self-determination was nearly always held in tandem with an affirmation of God's meaningful emotional experience by the major proponents of the classical impassibility model.

J. I. Packer clearly expresses this classical sentiment about God when he asserts that impassibility is

not impassivity, unconcern, and impersonal detachment in the face of creation; not insensitivity and indifference to the distresses of a fallen world; not inability or unwillingness to empathize with human pain and grief; but simply that God's experiences do not come upon him as ours come upon us, for his are foreknown, willed and chosen by himself, and are not involuntary surprises forced on him from outside, apart from his own decision, in the way that ours regularly are.

As we look toward the fuller historical investigation, these statements can count as something of a provisional definition of the classical view of divine impassibility.

Impassibility, Patripassianism, and Theopaschitism

Having said all that, it is also necessary to distinguish impassibility from two related theological terms that were part of the landscape in the doctrine of the early church: patripassianism and theopaschitism. Patripassianism is another name for the Trinitarian heresy of modalistic monarchianism or Sabellianism. In the contemporary discussion, passibilist theologians are sometimes charged with advocating patripassianism. In actual fact, though, this is an imprecise charge, because it misses a nuanced distinction between passibility and patripassianism. We might put it this way: it is possible — as with most of the leading contemporary passibilists — to deny patripassianism and still affirm passibility. That is, both concepts get at the suffering of God, but they do so in different ways. Patripassianism affirms that the Father suffers on the cross because of a modalistic understanding. Most contemporary passibilists, on the other hand, allow the Trinitarian distinction of persons and yet maintain that the Father also suffered at the cross, albeit distinctively. In seeking maximum precision, then, we should acknowledge this important distinction between passibility and patripassianism and not strictly equate the two.

Theopaschitism focuses more properly on the christological issue. In its early history, the theopaschite formula was sometimes defended by monophysites, and as such was condemned on several occasions. In 553, at the Second Council of Constantinople, however, the formula was approved. Presumably no longer linked with monophysitism, the tenth anathema of the council reads, "If anyone does not confess that our Lord Jesus Christ who was crucified in the flesh is true God and the Lord of Glory and one of the Holy Trinity; let him be anathema." In this mature formulation, then, all that was explicitly affirmed was the fact that the incarnate Christ suffered in the flesh. The formula did not offer a specific claim about how or whether Christ's divine nature was implicated in the experience of Jesus's incarnate sufferings. Once again, it appears that theopaschitism — as with patripassianism — is sufficiently distinct from passibility that, for the sake of clarity, we should try to avoid overlapping usage.

Passibility in Modern Christian Thought

In contrast with their ancient counterparts, when contemporary theologians affirm that God is passible, it seems that they most often intend to assert that God suffers, and they usually understand this suffering in a predominantly psychological sense, insofar as they retain a belief in God's incorporeality. As Thomas Weinandy has observed, with respect to the contemporary milieu, "the question of God's passibility focused primarily and, at times almost exclusively, upon the issue of whether God could suffer. The catalyst for affirming the passibility of God, one that is still intensely operative, is human suffering.... Succinctly," the passibilists have concluded, "God is passible because God must suffer." Thus, we are again reminded that not only do passibilists and impassibilists draw different conclusions about the nature of divine emotion, but they also often operate with different definitions from the outset.

Impassibility and the Vocabulary of "Emotion"

Adding yet another layer of complexity to this challenging topic is the fact that while, popularly speaking, there is a great deal of conceptual overlap in the contemporary vocabulary of "emotion," there is, nevertheless, a place for technical precision and nuance when one uses such vocabulary in certain fields of specialization. Hence, I acknowledge at the outset that while I am interested, for instance, in what modern psychology and philosophy have to say about the definition of various terms in the vocabulary of emotion, I do not write on this topic as a specialist in the psychology or philosophy of emotion. In the main, then, throughout this study, I intend to make use of the major terms of the vocabulary of emotion (e.g., emotion, passion, affection, feelings) with a degree of layman-like interchangeability. There will be exceptions, however, where for some particular historical or theological purposes I discriminate among these terms with more specificity and precision. Those exceptions to my more normal practice will be clear from the context.

Impassible and Impassioned

In terms of my own formulation, my central focus is in the domain of theology proper, though I do not neglect to pair this formulation with the vitally intertwined incarnational component of the debate over divine impassibility. Respecting theology proper, my primary thesis is that, when appropriately understood, a holistic reading of Scripture itself compels the conclusion that proper senses of both impassibility and impassionedness are true of God. To expand a bit, I take it that God is impassible in the sense that he cannot be manipulated, overwhelmed, or surprised into an emotional interaction that he does not desire to have or allow to happen. But this is not at all the same thing as saying that God is devoid of emotion, nor is it the equivalent of saying that he is not affected by his creatures. To the contrary, God is impassioned (i.e., perfectly vibrant in his affections), and he may be affected by his creatures, but as God, he is so in ways that accord rather than conflict with his will to be so affected by those whom, in love, he has made. The development of this thesis will require an integrated examination of the overlapping methodological, hermeneutical, and theological dimensions invoked by the endeavor to provide a holistic reading of Scripture as it pertains to this topic.

Of course, we should not be surprised at the biblically required duality here, for many participants in this discussion immediately recognize that in view of both the Creator/creature distinction and the human status as imago Dei, there must be both similarity and dissimilarity in how the same emotional terminology applies to God and men. Consequently, one of the undergirding methodological components of this proposal is the interpretive guidance of what is sometimes known as Reformed theological method. This method of interpretation, which I argue comes to us ultimately from the framework of Scripture, helps us to navigate the analogical balance between divine and human passion as we examine relevant biblical texts. Additionally, expounding this duality theologically will require that we develop this model of impassibility in the light of insights that come to us from other larger theological structures in the doctrine of God (e.g., transcendence and immanence), as well as companion attributes (e.g., omniscience, immutability, and divine love).

With respect to the christological implications of my thesis, I contend — against passibilist intuitions — that the incarnation and the atonement do not dash the key commitments of divine impassibility. Rather, the incarnation furnishes us with the supreme example of the dual biblical affirmation of divine self-sufficiency and gracious condescension (e.g., Phil. 2:5–8). Accordingly, we see that the second person of the Trinity had to become incarnate in order to overcome natural divine impassibility (i.e., the impassibility of the divine nature), and thereby accomplish the redemptively necessary goal of humanly experiencing suffering and death on behalf of sinners. This account of the incarnation and atonement is important, because it reminds us that the purpose of the Son's incarnational mission was to save sinners and not to manifest God's eternal suffering, as some have argued.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Expanded Outline 11

Foreword Bruce A. Ware 16

Preface 19

Acknowledgments 24

Abbreviations 27

1 Impassibility: What's in a Name? 29

Part 1 The Doctrine of Divine Impassibility in Historical Context

2 Contextualizing Patristic Thought on Divine Impassibility: The Hellenization Hypothesis 41

3 Patristic Models of Divine Impassibility 64

4 Medieval and Reformational Reflections on Divine Impassibility 107

5 Assessing the Widespread Rejection of Divine Impassibility in Modern Theology 123

6 Contemporary Impassibilist Thought and Evangelical Reflection on Divine Impassibility 148

Part 2 A Contemporary Case for Understanding God as Both Impassible and Impassioned

7 Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theological Hermeneutic 171

8 Impassible and Impassioned: Interpretive Prospects 189

9 Impassible and Impassioned: A Theological Model 217

10 Impassibility and Incarnation: A Concluding Christological Reflection 260

Conclusion 280

Bibliography 285

General Index 315

Scripture Index 325

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Though a young and upcoming evangelical scholar, Rob Lister has made a very significant contribution to one of the most difficult theological doctrines, the impassibility of God. By combining historical theology, interaction with contemporary nonevangelical theories, a retroductive theological method, circumspect metaphysical reflection on divine revelation, biblical theology, and systematic theology (especially theology proper and christology), Lister offers a convincing case that God is both impassible and impassioned. This book sets the standard on this topic and is a model of evangelical scholarship at its finest!”
—Gregg R. Allison, Professor of Christian Theology, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Secretary, Evangelical Theological Society; author, God, Gift, and Guide: Knowing the Holy Spirit

“Although the concept of divine passibilism, appropriate in some ways for a deeply sentimentalized culture, is all the rage in modern theology, for most of the history of the church, God was viewed as being impassible. Why was this so, and how did the Bible shape this perspective of God? And can we construct a model in this regard that does justice to what the Scriptures and church history say about God, and that also engages with modern sensibilities? This study by Rob Lister is extremely helpful in answering these questions: it is preeminently scriptural, takes the Rezeptionsgeschichte of this doctrine very seriously, and satisfactorily answers current concerns.”
—Michael A. G. Haykin, Professor of Church History and Biblical Spirituality, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

“Rob Lister boldly goes where few evangelicals have gone before in this very helpful study of how best to make sense of what Scripture says about God’s emotions. Lister does away with caricatures of the Patristic tradition as having sold out to Greek philosophy, surveys contemporary evangelical positions on divine impassibility, and provides a constructive hermeneutical method and theological model for doing justice both to the impassibilist tradition and to biblical language about divine emotions. As G. K. Chesterton observes, ‘an inch is everything when you’re balancing,’ and to Lister’s credit he completes his routine without falling off the balance beam that is systematic theology.”
—Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Research Professor of Systematic Theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

“Understanding how an infinite God relates to finite creatures is at the heart of most theological difficulties. How can God be holy and sovereign and personal and relational? That God is transcendent and immanent is central to understanding the God of the Bible. In this book, Rob Lister has given us tremendous help in navigating these deep theological waters. His theological method is a fantastic and much needed model of biblically grounded synthetic analysis that incorporates keen exegetical insights that are well informed by historical theology. Lister offers a biblically balanced understanding of God’s emotional life so that his sovereign majesty and covenant intimacy are preserved. The implications of this study for understanding God, humanity, Christ, relationships, and emotions in general are far-reaching and vital. I pray that the conclusions and theological method of this excellent work are deeply and widely influential for the glory of God.”
—K. Erik Thoennes, Professor and Chair of Theology, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University; Elder of Congregational Life, Grace Evangelical Free Church, La Mirada, California

“In this well-organized and well-written volume, Rob Lister challenges the view that the church fathers’ version of divine impassibility precluded God’s showing emotion. He swims upstream against modern passibilism, and he opposes those evangelicals who reject impassibility in the name of affirming divine passion. I was impressed with Lister’s accuracy and kindness whenever he takes exception to others’ views. The work is largely positive and constructive rather than negative and reactive. Lister argues ‘passionately’ for the view that God is both impassible and impassioned, even as he is both transcendent and immanent. Lister’s work demonstrates multiple areas of competence—historical, biblical, theological, and philosophical—and is nuanced, holding that ‘God’s passion transcends human passion both ontologically and ethically.’ I am, therefore, pleased to commend it to readers for serious consideration.”
—Robert A. Peterson, independent researcher, St. Louis, Missouri

“Whether God is subject to suffering is hardly a recent question, but it is an issue that contemporary Christians have been constrained to ponder carefully in order to provide scripturally measured and biblically tempered answers in a generation that prefers to conceive of and worship a God forged after human likeness. Despite the profundity of this issue and the inherent difficulty of giving adequate expression to whether God is passible or impassible, Rob Lister provides accessibility and clarity to this issue in a scripturally governed, admirably balanced, and manifestly humble manner. He engages theologians ancient and modern as his theological conversation partners while he guides readers through the many pitfalls and hazards that threaten to entangle us primarily in two antithetical but equally defective views of God: either to cast him in our image and likeness or to project onto him an aloofness that renders him cold, even grotesque. Lister rightly insists that in order to provide biblically rooted answers to the questions he addresses it is crucial to acknowledge and embrace the chasm that distinguishes the Creator from his creatures. Yet, equally crucial is the fact that the Creator made humanity, the creature, in his image and after his likeness, for this is God’s revelatory nexus by which God makes himself known to us both as impassible and as impassioned.”
—Ardel B. Caneday, Retired Professor of New Testament Studies and Greek, University of Northwestern, St. Paul, Minnesota

“This is an excellent study in systematic theology that exemplifies detailed research in biblical theology and historical theology, and draws these into a coherent systematic construction with relevance for contemporary life. I found Lister’s hermeneutical and theological analyses of passibilist and impassibilist arguments to be instructive and sharp. The project is well conceived and follows an explicit methodology with systematic guardrails from Scripture to frame the difficult biblical and theological details. Lister has ably handled difficult questions that impinge on God’s impassibility and passionate involvement with his creations: God’s relation to time and eternity, incarnate suffering, biblical accounts of God’s repentance, theodicy, and God’s immanence and transcendence. Despite the difficulties, Lister provides careful definitional distinctions and clarity of communication in a surprisingly light writing style that is uncommon to academic theology.”
—John E. McKinley, Associate Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University; author, Tempted for Us