Divine Impassibility

As the Westminster Confession of Faith puts it, "God is without body, parts, or passions." Given contemporary objections, why should Christians still affirm divine impassibility?... Kevin DeYoung gives us four reasons why we should still uphold this incommunicable attribute.

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Transcript

In simplest terms, divine impassibility means that God does not suffer. Or to put it a little more broadly: impassibility means God cannot be acted upon from without, neither can his inner state change for better or worse. As the Westminster Confession of Faith puts it, God is “without body, parts, or passions” (WCF 2.1).

Of all the classic attributes, impassibility is the one most likely to be rejected by contemporary Christians. You might be thinking to yourself: Isn’t the God of the Bible full of emotion and feeling? Isn’t impassibility just a holdover from Greek philosophy and the idea of an Unmoved Mover? Or more existentially you might wonder: In a world of pain, who wants a God immune from human suffering anyway? Besides, doesn’t the crucifixion reveal that God—in his very nature—is a suffering God?

Given these objections, why should Christians still affirm divine impassibility? Let me give you four reasons.

First, divine impassibility has been taught by the Christian church from the beginning. The early church held it as self-evident that God was unchangeable, eternal, and incapable of being acted upon from within or without. This did not mean that they thought of God as static and lifeless. The church fathers believe that the impassible God was also passionate. God is immoveable, but not inert. He does not have emotions like us, but he is not motionless.

From Anselm to Aquinas to Calvin, almost no theologian believed that God suffered. And at the same time, they never thought of God as distant or uncaring.

Second, divine passibility leads to all sorts of problems. If God suffers along with us, then not must God be miserable all the time. And God must be undergoing constant change. This places God on the same ontological level as his creation. He is no longer being; he is becoming. This in turn leads to errors like process theology whereby God is said to be in process with us, hoping to solve the problem of human suffering so that he himself can be free from his own suffering. That is a helpless God unlike the God of the Bible.

Third, God’s emotional life is not identical to ours. Everyone recognizes that the Bible often describes God as having various body parts—a strong arm, a long nose, a footstool under his feet. We call these anthropomorphisms, talking about God using the language of human physicality. Well in the same way the Bible is full anthropopathisms, talking about God using the language of human emotions.

While we do not want to be afraid to use the language of Scripture, we must not think that God “feels” the way we feel. Emotions sweep over us, but God is not made to feel by forces outside of himself. God has affections (motions of the will), but philosophically speaking, he does not have passions (experiences that happen to him or render him passive).

God cannot be affected from without, nor does he will to be changed from within. God is so completely full of action that he cannot change. Impassibility does not reject God’s vitality; it safeguards it.

Fourth, impassibility maintains the full glory and mystery of the incarnation. If God as God can suffer, then there was no need for the Son of God to become, as Hebrews puts is, for a little while lower than the angels so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.

Think of that line from Wesley’s hymn “And Can It Be”: “Tis mystery all, the Immortal dies.” There is nothing remarkable about the mortal dying and nothing amazing about the passible suffering. The wonder of wonders is that in the incarnation, God did the most un-Godlike thing possible: he suffered and died. And the incarnation was necessary for that to happen.

The incarnation is not a revelation of the eternal suffering of God but the deepest expression of God’s love whereby he chose freely to suffer as one of us. The good news is not that God feels our pain but that on the cross, the God-man felt human pain, and that by his suffering he conquered sin, death, and the devil for every human being that trusts in him.

Kevin DeYoung is the senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church (PCA) in Matthews, North Carolina and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary.