Posted by deangonzales on February 25, 2009
Recently, I posted an essay entitled “There Is No Pain, You Are Misreading”: Is God “Comfortably Numb”? which addresses the question, Does God have feelings? The series focuses on the relationship of divine emotivity (i.e., emotions predicated of God in the Bible) to the doctrine of God’s transcendence, sovereignty, and immutability. I received a number of comments on the posts, some public and some private, most positive. One such response came from a young college student named Ben Maas. Ben is a member of First Presbyterian Church, Ada, Ohio, and is currently pursuing a double major in Pharmacy and Philosophy at Ohio Northern University. I was particularly impressed with Ben’s reflections on the subject not merely because Ben generally agreed with my position ☺ but, more importantly, because of their clarity and cogency (at least in my estimation). Initially, I thought of asking Ben to append his extended reflections as a “comment” to one of my posts. However, since Ben’s reflections not only agreed with the thrust of my argument but in some ways complemented and advanced my case, I asked Ben permission to upload his reflections as a separate post on the RBS Tabletalk blog. He humbly and graciously agreed. I’ve interspersed a few of my own comments by way of footnote to clarify or expand on something Ben says. So, I invite you to read Ben’s “twelve theses” on the relationship of divine emotivity and divine impassibility below. And feel free to comment if you wish.
Your servant,
Bob Gonzales
Twelve Theses on the Relationship of Divine Emotivity and Impassibility
1. To say that God is unchangeable and therefore He cannot have different emotions at different points in time is to beg the question, for the debate involves demarcating exactly what part of Him is changeable and what part is unchangeable. Seeing as He acts differently at different points in time (e.g. God created the universe only once) it is clearly unacceptable to assume a completely unified immutability in God. There has to be some aspect of change.
2. To say that God would contradict Himself if He willed Himself to have emotions (because He would be bound to His decree and therefore “have no choice” in His actions) is to introduce awkward extra-biblical assumptions and is self-refuting, for He has clearly bound Himself to His decree in terms of His actions. His volitions are clearly examples of consequential necessities and, therefore, we cannot say a priori that emotions cannot reside in the same category. Just as God has “no choice” not to do something if He has decreed to do that thing, so also He can decree Himself to have emotions.
3. That God is forever blessed and ultimately pleased with all of creation and providence does not preclude the notion that He may be proximately displeased with specific aspects (e.g. Gen. 6:6). If one objects that this is a contradiction, i.e., for God to be eternally blessed yet displeased, or for God to be angry towards one part of creation and pleased towards another simultaneously, then I respond to him that he is not properly treating the distinctions previously set forth. (1) To say He is ultimately pleased with a course of events as a whole is not to say He is proximately pleased at every point in time during those events. For instance, I can look at a person’s injury or surgery and be displeased or grieved, even if I possess the certain knowledge that the injury or surgery will ultimately improve them. In fact, even if I were in God’s role and organized that entire situation providentially, I would still be proximately displeased at that point, but not universally displeased. (2) The propositions would be contradictory only if God acted differently in the exact same circumstances, i.e., towards the same object and at the same time and in the same place. That is never claimed for those with a more nuanced view of impassibility (e.g. Dr. Gonzales and me). Lastly, God acts differently at the same time in different places towards different objects, and no one grants that as a contradiction. He can likewise will internal emotions at different times toward different objects. No one can deny that God is complex in a sense: just as it sounds almost absurd that God may listen to every believer’s prayers occurring simultaneously, so also He can have specific emotional dispositions towards different people at the same time. This is not a contradiction.
4. The explanation that all emotional descriptions of God in Scripture are anthropopathic and purely volitional does not cover many passages, namely, the ones that describe only God’s internal state (again Gen. 6:6). If it is true that love, grief, joy, etc., are not emotional in the archetypal form, then it makes no sense to speak of these apart from specific actions at any point. Genesis 6:6 and other verses clearly speak only of God’s internal state, and consequently they cannot be interpreted as solely external or volitional.[1]
5. That some humans are overly emotional and can wrongly act off their emotions does not preclude that God may properly use emotions.
6. It is possible even as humans to will one’s own emotion (e.g. getting “pumped up” before an athletic event) and consequently such a concept cannot be viewed as impossible. And even if it were impossible for humans, it could not be deemed a divine impossibility.[2]
7. It is possible to affirm impassibility, i.e. that God is not internally affected by His creation, and divine emotivity, i.e. that God brings about His own emotional/internal changes. It is improper to assume that imputing any emotion to God requires the kind of interpersonal relationship advanced by process theology, open theism, or pantheism as a logical consequence.
8. Emotions such as anger, love, joy, etc., when predicated of humans, always seem to convey both an internal reaction and an external action (God’s reaction is not involuntary as ours would be, however; see point #11). This is evident from the light of nature, and if we have no reason in Scripture to interpret God’s love and grief differently from the concepts that immediately appear in our minds, then that is how they should be interpreted. To do otherwise – to affirm a narrow kind of impassibility that precludes genuine emotions – would be to eisegete, not protect the Creator-creature distinction.
9. To argue that the stance of the more nuanced impassibility (advanced by Dr. Gonzales and some of the other Reformed writers he cited) is arguing ectypically, from creature to Creator (and therefore idolatrously), is to assert another awkward extra-biblical assumption. If we cannot legitimately argue from effect to cause, especially when Scripture itself has not warranted interpreting God’s emotions anthropopathically,[3] then we run into a horde of interpreting problems. If Scripture tells us that we are made in the image of God, and if it does not tell us of a stark difference between divine and human emotions (in that the former does not entail any internal motions), and if the words for various emotions are used to describe God (e.g. love, joy, anger), then the plain reading of the text demands an emotive reading of God. Done with the proper understanding of God, and without any absurd presuppositions, such as ones leading to process theology and open theism, we can understand God properly. If one seriously objects that this is arguing ectypically, then my response is merely that it is the best we’ve got – what else would be base our interpretations off of but the obvious meaning, especially when no other Scripture demands that it be interpreted otherwise? If that is idolatrous, I have no idea how to possibly avoid it, or how inserting an extra-biblical principle is better, assuming a kind of strict or absolute impassibility is not proven in other Scripture.
10. Stemming from #9, it follows that a specific hermeneutic that denies a literal interpretation is allowed (perhaps mandated) if other Scripture warrants it. Therefore, those holding to my view of impassibility will not be obliged to believe that God actually repented of His actions at any point in the Bible when this is mentioned, for we know that omniscience explicitly denies this.
11. I have always thought of immutability in terms of an equation which God has Himself ordained: A+B=C, wherein A=God’s holy and immutable character, B=a human action, and C=God’s reaction to the human action. Seeing as God ordains every single aspect of this equation, He is still entirely sovereign over this and therefore not passible as humans are. He never meets a legitimate action that prompts an involuntary reaction from Him. He is in control of all ends and means. This equation also understands immutability properly in that there are specific changeable and unchangeable aspects of God.
12. Many emotions, anger and love especially, demand an internal and emotion aspect to them. This is plain from the light of nature. It is simply unimaginable to conceive of the King of universe who purportedly hates sin to have a smile on His face (forgive the second commandment transgression) while executing unspeakably painful judgments upon those who have profaned His name and broken His law so egregiously. It is preposterous to speak of the heinousness of sin vis-à-vis God’s emotional (i.e., inward) immutability, as it essentially makes God look as if He does not care about sin. In other words, while many who affirm a strict or absolute impassibility may claim that they also do not want an impersonal god or a god who is “comfortably numb,” those descriptors do perfectly describe such a god. Love is inconceivable as a mere external action. In fact, Paul describes one of the most externally loving acts in the world, laying down one’s life, as being done in vain if not done with love (1 Cor. 13:3). How, then, can love be a merely volitional quality if it can be a completely different entity based on an internal aspect? This difference between Creator and creature in strict impassibility seems to be far too much and approaches deism.
Ben Maas
Ada, Ohio
[1] Indeed, a careful reading of the verse following Genesis 6:6 reveals that God’s inward response to the proliferation of human sin is not identical to his portended external response but is, rather, the basis for that external response: “So the LORD said, “I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth– men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air– for I am grieved that I have made them [emphasis added]” (6:7, NIV). Bob G.
[2] As I noted in Part 3, footnote 2, Jonathan Edwards argues, I think cogently, that emotions (or “affections” as he calls them) are in fact an aspect of the volitional faculty. See A Treatise on Religious Affections (1746; reprint, Banner of Truth, 1961), 24-27. Moreover, John Frame shows the connection between the mind and the emotions—emotive responses being intertwined with cognitive evaluations of events or states of affairs. The Doctrine of God (Presbyterian & Reformed, 2002), 509-12, 528-29, 608-11. Hence, we should not view the mind, will, and emotions as compartmentalized psychological faculties but as interrelated aspects or perspectival descriptions of what the Bible frequently calls “the heart.” Bob G.
[3] I don’t object to the use of the term “anthropopathic” in describing the Scriptures ascription of emotions to God provided that the term is used to indicate correspondence (not univocacy) with human emotivity and not used to construe divine and human emotivity as absolutely discorrespondent. Indeed, even in the case of “anthropomorphic” language, the emphasis is on correspondence not discorrespondence: “He who planted the ear, does he not hear? He who formed the eye, does he not see?” (Psalm 94:3, ESV). Bob G.
Posted by deangonzales on February 9, 2009
When God saw the proliferation of human sin and misery on the earth (Gen. 6:5, cf. 11-12), he “was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain” (Gen. 6:6, NIV). One commentator doesn’t miss the vital importance of this inspired disclosure:
From the first Fall sin had grown like an avalanche; here at a special climax the narrator pauses and interrupts the regular progress of the account. He takes us from the world of complete disorderliness to God and dares to look into God’s grieving heart…. In daring contrast to what is said about the human heart there follows a word about what takes place in God’s heart: grief, affliction, and disappointment in man. Precisely in this way, by reference to the Creator’s bewilderment, he has communicated something of the incomprehensibility of this incursion of sin.”
As noted in our two previous posts, there exists a difference of opinion among commentators and theologians whether we should take such emotional responses ascribed to God literally. In Part 1 of our study, we observed that many Bible scholars resist a more literally reading of emotivity ascribed to God. One reason that gives these scholars pause is the fact that emotions as experienced by humans often include a physiological dimension. Sweaty palms, flushed face, rapid heartbeat, goose bumps and other like physical phenomena frequently accompany human emotivity. Since God is an incorporeal Spirit (Rom. 1:20; Col. 1:15; 1 Tim. 1:17), theologians have correctly rejected any physiological dimension to divine emotivity. This also may have been part of the reason why many theologians call emotional ascriptions to God “anthropopathisms” (i.e., human emotions ascribed to God that have a figurative not literal meaning) much like bodily ascriptions to God are called “anthropomorphisms” (i.e., human body parts ascribed to God that have a figurative not literal meaning).
But, as we’ve seen, many classical theologians that reject a more literal reading of divine emotivity are motivated by more than a concern to protect God’s incorporeal nature. After all, with the exception of strict materialists, everyone agrees that emotivity has a psychological as well as physical dimension. If so, why can’t God experience the psychological aspect without the physical? Enter the doctrines of divine transcendence, sovereignty and immutability. Emotions, affections, and passions are commonly understood as inward reactions and/or responses to outside stimuli. These inward reactions and/or responses entail psychological changes. Since, according to Scripture, God is unchangeable or immutable (Num. 23:19; 1 Sam. 15:29; Ps. 102:27; Mal. 3:6; James 1:16-18; Heb. 1:12; 13:8), how can we attribute psychological “changes” to an unchangeable Being?
Moreover, the outside stimuli to which you and I respond (i.e., circumstances or events that normally provoke emotive responses) are often beyond our control. We have little or no control over the premature death of a family member that brings grief, the deceitful politician who provokes anger, or the surprise birthday party that prompts joy and gratitude. And some outward circumstances, which confront us, are so surprising and overwhelming that we have trouble controlling the emotional responses themselves. Many of us can recall the sibling or friend hiding behind the door whose “surprise” appearance and exclaimed “boo” sent us emotionally (not literally) “through the ceiling.” Almighty God, however, stands transcendently above time and space (Gen. 1:1; Pss. 90:2; Isa. 40:25-28; 57:15; John 1:1; Acts 17:24-28; Rom. 1:20; 16:26; Col. 1:16-17; 1 Tim. 1:17; 2 Pet. 3:8). Furthermore, he is absolutely sovereign. He’s planned every event that has or ever will come to pass within the matrix of human history. He actively controls every event and circumstance so that nothing can take him unawares or by surprise (Gen. 50:20; Job 23:13-14; Ps. 135:6; Prov. 16:33; Isa. 46:9-10; Dan. 4:34-35; Acts 4:27-28; Rom. 8:28-29; 9:19-20; Eph. 1:11). Since God is the supreme ruler and governor over all things, how can we attribute psychological “reactions” and “responses” that would make him seemingly the “pawn” of outward circumstance and, therefore, vulnerable?
I suspect it was this latter concern—a concern to protect God’s transcendence, sovereignty, and immutability—that primarily has driven some classic theologians to reject, minimize, or redefine divine emotivity. The concern to guard God’s incorporeality was secondary. This suspicion is supported by the fact that the primary heresies to which classic theists have responded on the question of divine emotivity have affirmed the incorporeality of God but have tended to reject (in part or entirely) God’s absolute transcendence, sovereignty, and/or immutability. These would include Socinianism, Pantheism, Panentheism or Process Theology, and Open Theism. None of these views attribute to God a literally body like that of man’s (though Pantheism and Panentheism closely identify God with the material universe). They all, however, to one degree or another, challenge God’s absolute transcendence, sovereignty and/or immutability. They have no hesitation, therefore, conceiving of God as less than omnipotent and omniscient. He is, therefore, not absolutely sovereign over all events in creation. Accordingly, he is subject to external stimuli and genuine change. For example, Clark Pinnock, an Open Theist, doesn’t hesitate to assert, “God does not control everything that happens. Rather, he is open to receiving input from his creatures. In loving dialogue, God invites us to participate with him to bring the future into being.” This line of reasoning, not surprisingly, exploits the biblical data on divine emotivity. “God is not cool and collected,” avers Pinnock, “but is deeply involved and can be wounded.” Indeed, this capacity to feel sorrow and pain makes God genuinely “vulnerable.”
When one considers the clear biblical affirmations of God’s incorporeality, transcendence, sovereignty, and immutability, together with the ancient and modern challenges to these doctrines, he can understand why a number of classic theists and Reformed theologians have felt constrained to dissuade the reader from interpreting divine emotivity too literally. After all, responses to external stimuli that entail psychological changes would seem to conflict with the biblical portrait of a sovereign God who has decreed the end from the beginning and who does not change. It has seemed preferable to some, therefore, to interpose a great deal of dissimilarity between the referent we normally associate with emotional attributes and the referent to which such emotive attributions actually point when predicated of God. As a result, what you and I normally think of as emotions turn out to be quite different when applied to God. They refer, metaphorically, to divine actions (redemptive or punitive), which, in turn, spring from unchanging ethical virtues within the Godhead.
Is this classical interpretation of divine emotivity, which some Reformed theologians advance, fully biblical? Should we interpret God’s heart-piercing grief over the explosion of human sin and misery in Genesis 6:6 as a mere metaphorical expression that points proleptically 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 emotivity and would, presumably, answer these questions in the negative. They insist that God has genuine feelings. I’m inclined to agree with this latter group of theologians. Here are my reasons:
1. The God Who Feels
I believe the Bible provides an overwhelming amount of data in favor of divine emotivity. God is said to feel such affections as love and hate, joy and grief, pleasure and anger, and peace. And this list is by no means exhaustive. Of course, the Scriptures also attribute human body parts to God, such as eyes, arms, hands, a mouth, etc. Obviously, God’s incorporeal nature constrains us to interpret the latter metaphorically, as “anthropomorphisms.” So, it has been argued, we must interpret God’s emotions in like fashion, as “anthropopathisms.”
However, as we noted above, emotivity has a psychological as well as physical dimension. This is true of mental activity as well. When humans think, there is both a psychological as well as physical dimension involved. Yet, very few theologians interpret cognitive activities ascribed to God metaphorically, as mere “anthroponouisms.” In fact, it can be argued that the essence of thinking, feeling, and choosing is not primarily physical but spiritual in nature. After all, may we not safely assume that the disembodied souls of righteous men in heaven presently experience joy, pleasure, and peace while the disembodied spirits of the ungodly experience sorrow, pain, and torment? What is more, the Bible ascribes emotional experience to angels, which are spiritual beings (Job 38:7; Pss. 103:20; 148:2; Rev. 5:11-14). It follows, then, that corporeality is not an essential feature of genuine emotivity. Hence, the obvious disjunction between human body parts (which are material) and divine “body parts” (which are metaphorical) does not equally apply to human and divine emotivity.
These considerations should prompt us to reconsider the way we think of so-called “anthropomorphisms” and “anthropopathisms.” Traditionally, Bible interpreters have reserved these expressions for some language about God. But since all special revelation comes to us via human language, then all special revelation is, in one sense, “anthropomorphic.” Furthermore, since the heavens declare the glory of God (Ps. 19:1; Rom. 1:19-20), then we may speak of general revelation as, in a sense, “anthropopomorphic” or, more generally, “cosmomorphic.” Of course, this line of reasoning corresponds nicely with man’s identity as “the image of God” (Gen. 1:26-27). As such, human beings are analogues of God. More precisely, we are visible replicas and representatives of the invisible God. Hence, we might even reverse the tables and refer to humans as “theomorphs” and human language as “theomorphic” Consequently, there is a reciprocal interplay between our knowledge of God and our knowledge of ourselves (and the world around us). This is the note on which Calvin begins his famous Institutes:
Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists in two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But, while joined by many bonds, which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern. In the first place, no one can look upon himself without immediately turning his thoughts to the contemplation of God, in whom he ‘lives and moves.’ For, quite clearly, the mighty gifts with which we are endowed are hardly from ourselves…. Then, by these benefits shed like dew from heaven upon us, we are led as by rivulets to the spring itself…. Accordingly, the knowledge of ourselves not only arouses us to seek God, but also, as it were, leads us by the hand to find him.
Conversely, writes Calvin, “It is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he has first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinize himself.” Unfortunately, Calvin forgets his own counsel when it comes to interpreting divine emotivity. Instead of looking for analogy, Calvin stresses discontinuity. Hence, when interpreting God’s grief in Genesis 6:6, Calvin insists,
The repentance [“grief,” NIV], which is here ascribed to God, does not properly belong to him, but has reference to our understanding of him. For since we cannot comprehend him as he is, it is necessary that, for our sake, he should, in a certain sense, transform himself…. Certainly God is not sorrowful or sad; but remains for ever like himself in his celestial and happy repose: yet, because it could not otherwise be known how great is God’s hatred and detestation of sin, therefore the Spirit accommodates himself to our capacity.
Two logical inconsistencies appear in Calvin’s reasoning. First, he seems willing to allow God the emotions of anger and detestation (or does he mean for us to take these figuratively too?) but not the emotions of regret and sorrow. Second, he argues that God (through Moses) uses descriptive language that, on the one hand, is not properly true of himself in order to, on the other hand, make known to us what “could not otherwise be known.” Am I missing something?
Similarly, when commenting on Isaiah 63:9, which reads, “In all [Israel’s] affliction [God] was afflicted,” Calvin remarks,
In order to move us more powerfully and draw us to himself, the Lord accommodates himself to the manner of men, by attributing to himself all the affection, love, and (sumpatheia) compassion which a father can have. And yet in human affairs it is impossible to conceive of any sort of kindness or benevolence which he does not immeasurably surpass.
So far so good. But then Calvin adds his anthropopathic qualifier: “not that [God] can in any way endure anguish, but, by a very customary figure of speech, he assumes and applies to himself human passions.” Of course, it’s true that divine emotivity is not univocal with human emotivity (any more than divine knowledge is univocal with human knowledge). Hence, one may speak of a degree of “accommodation” when applying language used to predicate human emotions to God. Nevertheless, as the imago Dei, man is an analogue of God. Accordingly, divine emotivity is the Archetype of human emotivity, which is the ectype. We are, therefore, compelled to agree with Donald Carson when he writes,
It is no answer to espouse a form of impassibility that denies that God has an emotional life and insists all of the biblical evidence to the contrary is nothing more than anthropopathism. The price is too heavy. You may then rest in God’s sovereignty, but you can no longer rejoice in his love. You may rejoice only in a linguistic expression that is an accommodation of some reality of which we cannot conceive, couched in the anthropopathism of love. Give me a break. Paul did not pray that his readers might be able to grasp the height and depth and length and breadth of an anthropopathism and know this anthropopathism that surpasses knowledge (Eph. 3:14-21).
In sum, we should not interpret God’s grief in Genesis 6:6 merely as a figure of speech that points to outward acts (i.e., judgment) rather than to an inward feelings (as it normally does vis-à-vis humans). After all, God has plenty of human words at his disposal to refer to judgment literally. Indeed, God employs such literal terminology in the subsequent context when he portends a worldwide flood (6:7ff.). So if God can use plain language to depict his imminent intervention in judgment, why employ a figurative expression that might lead the reader to the “mistaken” notion that the Almighty might have something analogous to human feelings?
Need I say more? God through Moses discloses to us that the escalation of human hubris and the misery that followed in its trail prompted him to grieve. Of course, his grief was not accompanied with literal tears or heaving breast. Nor was it tainted with sin, as post-lapsarian human grief often is. But it was grief nevertheless. Accordingly, Victor Hamilton is correct when he observes, “Verses like this remind us that the God of the OT is not beyond the capability of feeling pain, chagrin, and remorse. To call him the Impassible Absolute is but part of the truth.”
2. Impassible & Passible
But doesn’t the conclusion reached above contradict what the Bible teaches regarding God’s transcendence, sovereignty, and immutability? If God is above time and space, if he’s decreed and determines the end from the beginning, if he’s immutably happy in his “celestial repose,” how can we conceive of him as being moved to respond with sorrow by something outside himself (i.e., human sin and misery)? In other words, if we interpret God’s emotions as genuine inward responses to outward stimuli, won’t we compromise the doctrine of God’s impassibility?
The simple answer is “no.” Ultimately, God has determined the end from the beginning. He ordained the Fall (Gen. 3:1-6) and the proliferation of human sin (Gen. 6:5). He ordained his outward redemptive/punitive response to human sin (6:7ff.) But he also ordained his inward emotional response to human sin (6:6). In that sense, we may speak of God as “impassible.” Nothing takes God by surprise. On the other hand, God manifests his covenant presence within the matrix of human history. He not only exists outside of time and space, but he has chosen to manifest his presence within time and space. And within the matrix of human history, God responds or, if I may use the term without being misunderstood, he is “moved” by human events. In this (guarded) sense, we may speak of God as “passible.” Samuel Waldron, Academic Dean and Professor of Systematic Theology at Midwest Center for Theological Studies, agrees. “We must,” argues Waldron, “augment the doctrine of impassibility with a clear doctrine of divine relationality.” That is,
We must, I think, clearly affirm that God is both impassible and passible. As the God who was free not to create, as the God who has decreed whatsoever comes to pass, as the God who has no needs not satisfied by his own fullness, He is and must be immutable and impassible. He is (always has been and will be) serene in the blessedness of the inter-Trinitarian fellowship of persons and in the execution of His immutable and comprehensive decree.
Yet by His free act of creation God has chosen to subject Himself to the influences of His creatures. Of course, He has done this without giving up His position as the Creator and Sovereign of the universe who in Himself is immutably serene, has no need-based emotions, and who is immutable in His comprehensive purpose. Thus, He is only passible in exactly those ways and for exactly those purposes that He has freely chosen in His decree and in no other way. The fact, however, that He has chosen to be passible and passible in only those ways He has chosen does not devalue or deny the fact of His passibility. It simply means His passibility is limited and has to do with His purposes in the world—His free decision to glorify His name in the world. It also means that it coexists with an infinite and transcendent impassibility in God considered in Himself eternally.
John Frame, Professor of Apologetics and Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary, speaks in a similar fashion:
Although God’s eternal decree does not change, it does ordain change. It ordains a historical series of events, each of which receives God’s evaluation. God evaluates different events in different ways. Those evaluations themselves are fixed in God’s eternal plan. But they are genuine evaluations of the events. It is not wrong to describe them as responses to these events.
In the words of J. Oliver Buswell, “Does ever a sinner repent, there is always joy in the presence of the angels (Luke 15:7, 10). Does ever a child of God, ’sealed’ by the Spirit, fall into sin, the Holy Spirit is ‘grieved’ (Eph. 4:30).” In other words, God really responds emotively to events that transpire within creation and redemption history. One might say that God is “impassible” from the perspective of his transcendence and “passible” from the perspective of his immanence.
I’ve tried to think of a good illustration. Imagine God as the cosmic movie scriptwriter, producer, and director. God’s also chosen, like many modern directors, to participate in the story as one of the main actors. Indeed, he’s given himself the leading role. He’s created a magnificent epic. It’s full of tragedy. But it has a happy ending. As the scriptwriter, producer, and director, God takes pride in his work and enjoys it with a sense of peace, calm, and gratification, knowing the plot has a glorious ending. But as God actively participates in the various stages of the plot in the capacity of actor, he weeps at misfortune, grows angry at injustice, and rejoices in the triumph of good. Granted, this illustration fails to capture the full complexity of God’s heart. But I believe we must embrace all the biblical descriptions of God (those emphasizing his transcendence as well as those emphasizing his immanence) even if we can’t fully conceptualize their relations.
So I affirm that God is self-contained, independent, and wholly satisfied with himself. He possesses a kind of joy that cannot be marred. Yet, I also affirm that within the matrix of human history God experiences grief, sorrow, anger, pleasure, love, hatred, jealousy, joy and peace. All of these emotional responses are perfectly consistent with his unchanging “being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.”
3. Is this Consistent with the Confession of Faith?
The framers of the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Savoy Declaration, and the Second London Baptist Confession assert that God is “a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions [emphasis added]” (II, 1). Does the affirmation of divine emotivity (above) require us to reject the Confession’s teaching that God is “without … passions”? Some scholars believe so. But I’m not convinced we need disagree with our forefathers. We may, however, need to clarify or augment their teaching.
I have a facsimile copy of the 1689 (actually, 1677) Baptist Confession of Faith. There’s no proof text given. I don’t have a facsimile edition of the Westminster Confession. But in the edition I do have, as well as later editions of the Baptist Confession, Acts 14:11, 15 is given as a proof text. In that passage, 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 “the same [like] nature” (NKJ, NAS, ESV, CSB; NET) or “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 the framers of our Confession were probably thinking of the physiological dimension of human emotion, which, of course, could not be predicated of God. This would fit the context since the term “passions” is immediate preceded by the words “body” and “parts.” Perhaps adding the term “human” before “body, parts, or passions” would help to clarify the intent of the Confession and prevent modern Reformed Christians from arriving at the unbiblical 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 uninfluenced by philosophical notions related to divine impassibility. It is possible, therefore, that their doctrinal formula, viz., that God is “without … passions,” reflects an attempt to protect God’s transcendence, sovereignty, and immutability by means of precluding any genuine emotivity as a proper predicate of God. If so, then we may laud their zeal to protect God’s transcendence and agree that God is the ultimate cause behind every event in human history, including his own responses to sin (inwardly and outwardly). Hence, God is not passive. He is, in this sense, impassible. But affirming God’s impassibility vis-à-vis his transcendence, sovereignty, and immutability is only one part of the truth. God, as we have seen, is also covenantally present within the matrix of human history. Consequently, it may be appropriate at some point, for the sake of removing ambiguity and enhancing clarity, to augment the Confession’s excellent summary of God’s nature with an affirmation of his relationality toward the work of his hands not only outwardly (via the works of creation and providence [redemptive/punitive]) but inwardly (via emotive responses). Somehow, we, as Reformed Christians, need to make it plain to the world and to the church that the God we worship and serve is a God who genuinely feels.
Dr. Bob Gonzales, Dean
Reformed Baptist Seminary
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.” Emotions attributed to God in Scripture should be interpreted figuratively as “anthropopathisms,” by which God accommodates himself to our understanding. 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).” 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.” 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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
