“There Is No Pain, You Are Misreading”: Is God “Comfortably Numb”? Part 2
Posted by deangonzales on February 4, 2009
According to Genesis 6:6, God felt emotional pain as he assessed the proliferation of human sin and misery on the earth. But as we noted in Part 1 of this series, some classical and Reformed Bible scholars caution the reader against reading emotions predicated of God literally. “Certainly,” writes John Calvin, “God is not sorrowful or sad; but remains for ever like himself in his celestial and happy repose.”1 Emotions attributed to God in Scripture should be interpreted figuratively as “anthropopathisms,” by which God accommodates himself to our understanding.2 When the reader inquires after the referent to which these figures of speech point, he learns that the internal emotions ascribed to God actually refer to outward actions usually associated as the effect of such emotions. In the words of Francis Turretin, the emotivity ascribed to God in Genesis 6:6 refers “not to affection and internal grief, but to the effect and external work…. It must be understood not pathetically (pathetikos), but energetically (energetikos).”3 This line of reasoning may account (at least partly) for a statement found in the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Savoy Declaration, and the Second London Baptist Confession, all of which affirm that God is “without body, parts, or passions [emphasis added]” (II, 2). Moreover, this interpretation of emotions ascribed to God is commonly linked to the doctrine of divine impassibility, which, in turn, is related to God’s immutability.
It should be noted that this view of divine impassibility does not leave us with an immobile God. That is, these theologians do not portray God as if he were in an “eternally frozen pose.”4 Unfortunately, some classic theologians have employed illustrations that may have prompted such caricatures. Thomas Aquinas, for example, sought to account for apparent changes ascribed to God in relationship to creation or humanity by means of a fixed stone pillar. When the Scriptures ascribe changes in God’s attitude, disposition, or affections toward us, they are not literally ascribing change to God but changes in us that place us in a different relationship to the fixed stone pillar.5 Such an illustration is infelicitous since it leaves one with the impression that God is immobile. Aquinas and other classic theologians clearly deny this and affirm that God is active. Perhaps we would do better to liken God to a bar magnet. Get on his “right side,” and he finds you “attractive,” which the Scriptures might describe with such emotive terms as love, pleasure, or peace. Get on his “wrong side,” and he finds you “repulsive,” which the Scriptures might describe in terms of anger, wrath, or hatred. But this illustration, like Aquinas’s stone pillar, still leaves us with a God that seems less than personal and who is emotively detached from this world.
Not surprisingly, some Reformed theologians have expressed dissatisfaction with the classic treatment of divine emotivity sketched above. For instance, the great Princeton systematician, Charles Hodge, remarks,
The schoolmen, and often the philosophical theologians, tell us that there is no feeling in God. This, they say, would imply passivity, or susceptibility of impression from without, which it is assumed is incompatible with the nature of God…. Here again we have to choose between a mere philosophical speculation and the clear testimony of the Bible, and of our own moral and religious nature. Love of necessity involves feeling, and if there be no feeling in God, there can be no love…. The philosophical objection against ascribing feeling to God, bears, as we have seen, with equal force against the ascription to Him of knowledge or will. If that objection be valid, He becomes to us simply an unknown cause, what men of science call force; that to which all phenomena are to be referred, but of which we know nothing. We must adhere to the truth in its Scriptural form, or we lose it altogether. We must believe that God is love in the sense in which that word comes home to every human heart.6
One of Hodge’s students and the first president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, James Petigru Boyce, agreed with this mentor. Writes Boyce,
The immutability thus set forth in the Scriptures and implied in the simplicity and absolute perfection of God is not, however, to be so understood as to deny in him some real ground for the Scripture statements of emotional feeling in the exercise of joy, pity, longsuffering and mercy, or of anger, wrath and avenging justice. We could as well deny some real ground for the attributes of love, justice and truth which are at the basis of these emotions.7
Similarly, Benjamin B. Warfield employs his eloquence in favor of a theology that gives full place to divine emotivity. In a sermon entitled, “Imitating the Incarnation,” Warfield exclaims,
We have a God who is capable of self-sacrifice for us…. Now herein is a wonderful thing. Men tell us that God is, by very necessity of His own nature, incapable of passion, incapable of being moved by inducement from without; that he dwells in holy calm and unchangeable blessedness, untouched by human sufferings or human sorrows for ever,–haunting
The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud, nor moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
His sacred, everlasting calm.Let us bless God that it is not true. God can feel; God does love. We have Scriptural warrant for believing, as it has been perhaps somewhat inadequately but not misleadingly phrased, that moral heroism has a place within the sphere of the divine nature: we have Scriptural warrant for believing that, like the hero of Zurich, God has reached out loving arms and gathered to his own bosom that forest of spears which otherwise had pierced ours. But is not this gross anthropomorphism? We are careless of names: it is the truth of God. And we decline to yield up the God of the Bible and the God of our hearts to any philosophical abstraction. We have and we must have an ethical God; a God whom we can love, in whom we can trust.8
More recently, Gregory Nichols, one of our own systematic theology professors, has averred,
We must not deny either God’s infinite joy and blessedness or his incessant grief over human sin. Someone may object that these texts must contain a figure of speech, since God can’t really feel sensations of anguish. If so, why does Scripture ascribe this feeling to God? What truth does it actually tell us about him? All such objections fly in the face of the clear and emphatic teaching of Scripture.9
Other Reformed theologians such as Oliver Buswell, Robert Reymond, John Frame, and Michael Horton have added their voices to these witnesses. They note that some theologians have pressed the concept of impassibility so far as to deny even that God responds emotively. But they reject that view as unbiblical, noting that Scripture writers ascribe many attitudes to God that are generally regarded as emotions.10
As these examples, not all Reformed theologians have embraced the treatment of divine impassibility that precludes the attribution of genuine emotional responses to God. In the next part in our series, we’ll argue, with the help of others, that it’s possible to affirm God is both impassible (viewed from one perspective) and also passible (viewed from another perspective). That is, it’s possible to affirm the proposition “God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable [emphasis added] in his being, power, wisdom, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth” while simultaneously affirming that God genuinely responds emotively to events in the world (including human sin and misery).
Dr. Bob Gonzales, Dean
Reformed Baptist Seminary
- Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis, trans. John King (Reprint, Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2003), 1:249. [↩]
- Ibid.; See also Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), 1:227 [Book I, 17.13]. [↩]
- Institutes of Elenctic Theology, trans. George Musgrave Giger, ed. James T. Dennison, Jr. (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1992), 1:206. [↩]
- This phrase is used by J. I. Packer, “God,” in New Dictionary of Theology, ed. Sinclair Ferguson and David Wright (Downers Grove: Inter-Varsity Press, 1998), 276. [↩]
- Summa Theologica (New York: McGraw-Hill Company, 1964), 1a.13.7. [↩]
- Systematic Theology (Reprint, Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989), 1:428-29. [↩]
- Abstract of Systematic Theology (1887; reprint, Hanford, CA: den Dulk Foundation, n.d.), 74. [↩]
- “Imitating the Incarnation,” in The Person and Work of Christ (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1950), 570-71. [↩]
- “The Emotivity of God,” Reformed Baptist Theological Review 1:2 (July 2004): 125. [↩]
- J. Oliver Buswell, A Systematic Theology of the Christian Religion (Grand Rapid: Zondervan, 1962), 1:57; Robert Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1998), 181-82; John Frame, The Doctrine of God (Phillipsburg: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2002), 608-11; Michael Horton, Lord and Servant: A Covenant Christology (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2005), 28, 52. [↩]
10 Responses to ““There Is No Pain, You Are Misreading”: Is God “Comfortably Numb”? Part 2”
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February 4th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Perhaps the Second London Baptist Confession should be revised to say “without body, parts, and excessive passions.”
February 4th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
John,
Interesting suggestion. I have a facsimile copy of the 1689 (actually, 1677) Confession of Faith. There’s no proof text given. I don’t have a facsimile edition of the Westminster Confession. But in the editions I do have, as well as later editions of the Baptist Confession, Acts 14:11, 15 are given. In that text, Paul and Barnabas dissuade the crowds in Lystra from venerating them as “gods” (v. 11) since they were mere mortals, that is, men of “like passions” (v. 15, KJV). Most modern translations render it same or like “nature” (NKJ, NAS, ESV, CSB; NET), “human like you” (NIV). At best, the text teaches that humans have human passions and, by way of inference, that deity does not have human passions. So perhaps adding the term “human” before “passions” would help to clarify the intent of the confessions and prevent modern Reformed Christians from arriving at the conclusion that God does not experience what are analogous to human emotions. On the other hand, I’m not convinced that the framers of the confessions (WCF, Savoy, LBCF) were not to some degree influenced by the philosophical notions related to divine impassibility. In any case, you suggestion is helpful. Certainly, God’s emotive responses are never excessive.
February 5th, 2009 at 9:13 am
Bob: Thanks for the observations and quotes on the impassibility of God. The most helpful discussion of this issue that I have read in recent years is in Don Carson’s The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God. It is in chapter 3 of that small book that Carson takes up the issue. Indeed, I gladly commend this work of Carson to anyone still sorting out questions of the “free offer” and God’s general love for mankind.
February 5th, 2009 at 9:53 am
Randy,
I heartily agree with your recommendation of Donald Carson’s The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Crossway, 2000). It’s one of the most clear-headed and balanced treatments of the subject I’ve ever read. I would urge anyone who’s interested in the subject of divine emotivity or, more particularly, divine love and how it relates to divine sovereignty to procure a copy. It’s available through WTS Bookstore (click here or see link above).
Bob G.
February 5th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
See the article, “A God without Mood Swing”:
http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/articles/impassib.htm
February 5th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Great article! I can’t wait for the next one!
I also agree with your assessment of Carson’s work on the love of God. It was one of those books that left me thinking, “Why has something so obvious, something right there in front of us for so long, been so elusive?”
I am grateful for the way God has used Carson to clarify a doctrine that really needed clarifying. And I am similarly grateful for the way you are doing this with these articles.
Thanks so much!
February 9th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
[...] to his enactment of the judgment portrayed in the subsequent context (6:7ff.)? As I demonstrated in Part 2 of this series, a number of Reformed theologians have not been persuaded by the classical treatment of divine [...]
February 10th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Trevor,
Thanks for pasting the link to Phil Johnson’s article “A God without Mood Swings.” I found myself agreeing with some of what Phil said and disagreeing with other things he said. I think he did a fairly good job representing the classical view of impassibility as well as today’s Open Theism. I share his concern to protect the church from Open Theism. Nevertheless, he doesn’t seem to get beyond some of the weaknesses of the classical view. For instance, he writes,
Here, it appears that Phil wants to remove any emotive or affective element from divine love. I don’t think that’s biblical. First, Inter-Trinitarian love certainly includes an affective or emotive element. It’s not just the the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit do nice things for each other. They actually feel warm affections for each other. Analogously, when a genuine born-again disciples loves and serves Christ, God the Father feels the love of complacency toward that disciple (John 14:21, 23). This is different from God’s electing love, which is extended towards the recipient irrespective of anything lovely in the recipient. God’s love of complacency that he feels towards believers is stimulated by attractive qualities they possess, which God himself has produced in them (Eph. 1:10; Phil. 2:12-13; Heb. 13:21). Moreover, I don’t agree that the love of 1 Corinthians 13 is affectionless. Indeed, Paul contrasts that love with a kind of disinterested altruistic love (vv. 1-3).
In sum, Phil’s article is helpful. But, like many classic and Reformed treatments, it seems one-sided to me. I found John Frame’s, Michael Horton’s, and Sam Waldron’s treatments of impassibility more balanced.
Bob G.
February 16th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
[...] way that seems, at best, somewhat one-sided and, as a result, imbalanced. In our next installation, Part 2, we’ll note some Reformed theologians have affirmed that God responds emotively. Following that, [...]
February 26th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
[...] and immutability. For those interested in reading those installments click here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. I received a number of comments on the posts, some public and some private, most positive. [...]