The Impassibility of God (III)

Said one writer on the question we are studying, particularly as to the connection between thought and emotion (See here - emphasis mine):

"A relationship between thoughts and emotions is substantial and complex – our thoughts and feelings profoundly influence one another. For example, if you are in a gloomy mood, you may notice that many of your thoughts are sad, negative, and have to do with hopelessness or worthlessness. In this case, your negative mood or emotions trigger certain types of thoughts. Once the negative thinking floods your mind, the negative mood gets even worse. And vice versa, if you have negative thoughts, they will most likely fuel your lousy mood. Moreover, these negative thoughts can provoke anxiety or keep you locked into a depressed mood."

Thoughts and feelings are interconnected, joined together. Where there is one, there is the other. So, how can one change his mood? Would it not be in changing one's thoughts? In the above article titled "Change How You Feel by Changing How You Think," we also find these profitable words:

 

"It is essential to understand the complicated reciprocal relationship between thoughts and emotions to tackle negative thinking patterns that contribute to stress, anxiety, and depression. One of the ways to change your negative emotions is to shift your attention. Choose to focus on more positive thoughts or aspects of a particular situation."  

Likewise, when we talk of God's feelings and emotions, we cannot divorce them from his thoughts. How God experiences emotion and how creatures experience emotion is not the same in every way. In fact, I question whether I can even say that God "experiences" anything. One author writing on the subject at Crossway wrote (see here):

"Does God Have Emotions? Yes, God does have emotions. Unpacking that truth, however, can be tricky. The discussion touches on an important point of theology: God’s impassibility. If you are familiar with that doctrine, you know the theology can get technical and hard to follow pretty quickly. And, complicating matters, theologians don’t all agree." 

Yes, this question can be quite "tricky" to answer. And yes this is where theology can seem to get too technical. I say "seem" because this issue is not unimportant. The same article says:

"The issue isn’t really whether or not God has emotions but what they are like. Does God experience emotions the way we do? Some theologians argue that he does and that this is basic to his ability to empathize with us. Other theologians argue that he does not experience emotions as we do at all. If he did, his emotions would make him as willy-nilly as we are, and we could no longer consider him reliably stable (i.e., immutable)."

Agreed. So, since we agree that God and creatures do not possess emotions in the same way, how are they alike and how are they different becomes our focus. This is the focus we have had in the previous two postings on this subject. 

Again the Crossway article says further, in stating this very thing:

"Does It Really Matter? This can sound a bit abstract and philosophical already, and you might be wondering, does impassibility really matter? It does. It really matters both that God has emotions and that they are different from ours in important ways."

Does it really matter? Yes, it does. If God is fickle, going from one mood to a next, then he is mutable, and I cannot be assured that he will love me the same tomorrow as he does today.

Again the Crossway article says further:

"We want to know that God relates to us emotionally without having the problems that our emotions create for us."

God does "relate" to us, because he made us and knows us better than we know ourselves, and not because he is experiencing the same changes of state as we. So the Psalmist said - "Know that the Lord, He is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves." (Psa. 100: 3) He also said:

"O Lord, You have searched me and known me. 2 You know my sitting down and my rising up; You understand my thought afar off. 3 You comprehend my path and my lying down, And are acquainted with all my ways. 4 For there is not a word on my tongue, But behold, O Lord, You know it altogether." (Psa. 139: 1-4 nkjv)

Again, God knows all this not because he actually experiences change in emotion, or changes in his emotional or mental state, but because he is omniscient. 

Crossway says further:

"Jesus’s flesh and bone are proof that God has established a deep connection to our emotional experience and he wants us to know about it. In fact, he demonstrates his solidarity with us, in particular, through Jesus’s suffering." 

Jesus was a man and he therefore had emotions as we do, excluding sinful passions. But, he was also God and therefore we can say that the divinity of Christ, being in union with his humanity, knew those passions without experiencing them in the same way as he did humanly. Christ grew in wisdom but this is not true of God. (Luke 2: 52) Christ became wearied (worn out), but God does not experience weariness. (John 4: 6) "He never gets weary or tired" said the prophet. (Isa. 40: 28) And yet the same prophet cites the word of God who said "You have wearied Me with your iniquities." (Isa. 43: 24) How are we to reconcile such passages? Only by seeing in the latter case an example where God is speaking as if he were a man, conveying the idea that he will cease being longsuffering or patient with the sins of the people. We may even translate the words of God as saying "I have had enough of your transgressions." What do we mean as humans when we say such a thing? Besides expressing an emotional state? We mean that our behavior toward another person will change. 

The Crossway article says further:

"So in what sense does God have emotions? Traditionally theologians have made a distinction between passions and affections. Historically passions described the more physical aspect of emotions, which, as we explained earlier, means that to some extent our bodies are always shaping our emotions. We don’t want to say that about God, though, because God doesn’t have a body, and God doesn’t get cranky when his blood sugar drops. The church fathers used the term passions to describe what God doesn’t have in order to defend against heresies which taught that the Father suffered on the cross or that God compromised his divine nature in order to accomplish salvation. In this sense, we ought to deny that God has passions. He is impassible, meaning that the creation or his creatures cannot push him around emotionally."

The view that the Father suffered on the cross was called "patripassianism" stemming from Modalism, the idea that the Father is the Son, and the connected idea that God suffered on the cross. I had to quit supporting a local group of Baptist churches because they had embraced both Modalism and patripassianism. 

So, is there a difference between affections, feelings, and passions? We seem to use these words as synonyms but theologians have traditionally made the distinction described in the above citation. When we refer to the passion of Christ, we are talking about his sufferings, physical, mental, and emotional, that he endured as a man with a human body. So we read - "To whom also he shewed himself alive after his passion by many infallible proofs." (Acts 1: 3) The word "passion" is from the Greek word "pascho" and means "to be affected or have been affected, to feel, have a sensible experience, to undergo." (Strong) The KJV translates the Greek word as suffer (39x), be vexed (1x), passion (1x), feel (1x).

Crossway says further:

"DeYoung goes on to capture the core beauty of God’s impassibility by saying that God “is love to the maximum at every moment. He cannot change because he cannot possibly be any more loving, or any more just, or any more good. God cares for us, but it is not a care subject to spasms or fluctuations of intensity.” Thus, while it might appear at first that the doctrine of God’s impassibility will leave us with a cold, distant, and disconnected deity, instead the exact opposite is true..."

Amen. Very well encapsulated. 

Crossway says further:

"In other words, God doesn’t have passions in that he is not jerked around by creation. God doesn’t have “good” days and “bad” days. The early fathers were not arguing that God is dispassionate but rather speaking in a philosophically credible way about how God is different from creatures. But these impassibility formulations should not compel us to say that God is in no way like us emotionally."

Again, this is the orthodox position and I think this is the way we are to think about the subject. 

The Got Questions article continues:

"The doctrine of the passibility of God has to do with the theology of the “suffering” of God. Does God suffer? Can He truly feel emotional pain? Some theologians see the impassibility of God as one of His attributes, right up there with His immutability, omniscience, or eternality. They see God as “apathetic” in the sense that He exists above human emotion and remains untouched by it. Others see God’s passibility as one of His essential attributes—they insist that God does indeed suffer with us."

Can God be sympathetic? Have empathy? Yes, but not in exactly the same way as we. When we say that God is sympathetic, we are simply saying that he understands and knows what we are experiencing, and not that he actually experiences a change in mood or emotional state. Thus, in one sense we can "hurt" God's feelings, and in another sense we cannot. 

The article continues:

"God does not have moods, nor "mood swings." He does not have changing emotional states. He does not suffer, experience pain, or experience changes in the degree of his happiness. God's happiness, his blessedness, is not affected by anything outside of himself. God cannot be manipulated. One cannot "play on his emotions," so to speak." 

As I pointed out in a preceding post, Satan does not agree with this. He believes he can cause God true grief and make his life unhappy. He believes he can irritate God. But, he is wrong. 

The article continues:

"The passions, emotions, and feelings that are ascribed to God in scripture have both a similarity and a difference to human passions."

Exactly, as I have been also affirming in this short series. God is not pictured as a Stoic nor as an overly emotional being. The bible does use anthropomorphisms and anthropopathisms. 

In "The Impassible God Who “Cried” Amos Winarto wrote the following under the heading "Addressing the Problem" (here): 

"Perhaps no traditional Christian doctrine has been subject to greater contempt from modern theologians than the assertion that God is “impassible” by nature. Such a doctrine sounds to many people today as if God does not care about human life."

Thus, this series is the way orthodox believers answer these modern theologians who insist, like Satan, that God can be disturbed, agitated, and lessened in his blessedness (happiness). This is why it is important to know the "sense" of scripture. (See Neh. 8: 8)

Winarto says further:

"Early fathers understood that divine impassibility is closely related to divine immutability. The reason is, as Paul Helm has explained, that “God cannot change or be changed, and a fortiori God cannot be changed by being affected. So that impassibility is a kind of immutability.”

Exactly. Since God is immutable, and ever infinitely blessed, he cannot suffer changes in his mental or emotional state as do humans.

Winarto says further:

"While the Bible attributes to God hands, eyes, and feet, what they depict about God is far different from what they refer to human beings. Similarly, while we can speak of God’s sensations and emotion, they too designate something radically different of God from what they designate of humankind."

Correct. It is well that we keep these things in mind as we read of such anthropomorphisms in the bible.

Winarto says further:

"In other words, for Tertullian divine impassibility does not mean that God is without emotion, rather it means that God possesses emotions in a divine manner."

That is the question to decide. How does God possess emotions "in a divine manner"? How is that manner unlike that of his creatures? Is it not in the way we have been arguing? 

In the next couple postings we will look at how the God of the bible is different from the pagan gods and goddesses as respect passions, and at some scripture that bears upon this point. How does God experience pleasure?