In 2022 I shared a lecture at a conference hosted by my school, reflections I shared online shortly after. A recent conversation with some of my university colleagues reminded me of that original lecture as its message is as timely as ever.

As I shared back then, there is a problem within the institutions of Christian higher education. More specifically, it concerns a theological habit that quietly shapes how many Christian universities think about their work, their mission, and their measures of success. I call this warrant theology.

By “warrant” I mean the justification, reason, cause, rationale, or basis for making a claim or taking action. Like we see in a police warrant, the warrant states the justification for your arrest. Similarly, if you draw a conclusion from some observations, we can ask: Is your conclusion warranted by the evidence? That is, is your conclusion justified and founded upon good reasons?

So, what is warrant theology?

Warrant theology uses the logic that “Jesus is the reason” for doing something. Jesus becomes the warrant. Jesus becomes the justification, rationale, and cause. We do X in the world because of Jesus.

The reason warrant theology is so pernicious is that, most of the time, it works. For followers of Jesus, Jesus is the reason we do everything in life. And if that's the case, what’s the problem? The problem lies in a subtle confusion between means and ends.

When we say “Jesus is the reason,” what exactly are we saying? We could be saying that Jesus is the end, the telos, the target, and the goal. We are doing X in order to move toward Jesus. We are imitating Jesus. We are conforming to the image of Jesus. In this sense Jesus is the destination.

But the phrase “Jesus is the reason” can also imply that Jesus is being used, not as the end, but as the means. Jesus becomes the justification for doing something we already wanted to do. This framework, Jesus as means toward an end, is much more problematic.

Consider the prosperity gospel. Is Jesus the end there, or the means? Is wealth a Christlike goal? Or is Christ being used, rather, as the religious justification for the pursuit of wealth?

Consider Christian nationalism. Is Jesus the end there, or the means? Is the pursuit of political power a Christlike goal? Or is Christ being used as the religious warrant for the pursuit of political power?

These examples show how warrant theology works in some well-known cases. But the same dynamic can also appear in much subtler places, including the life of Christian institutions. Let me give an example.

A friend of mine, a high school Athletic Director, invited me to address all the coaches at their start-of-year orientation meeting. The topic he asked me to address was this: What makes a high school athletic program Christian? By “Christian” we mean something unique and distinctive as compared to athletic programs in public schools.

I started by asking the coaches to share their coaching values and commitments. What do you say, over and over again, that captures the goals you have for your athletes and your teams?

In my experience with sports, both in school and watching my eldest son play three sports in high school, most coaching values boil down to a few familiar themes.

First, there is effort and commitment. Coaches want you to give 110%. They want you to be all in.

Second, is a team-first mentality. As coaches love to say, “There is no I in TEAM.”

Third, is an aspirational commitment. You have to believe. As Ted Lasso famously put it on the locker room wall: Believe.

Effort. Team first. Believe. These are the value commitments found in most athletic programs, and they were the commitments expressed by the coaches I was speaking to. So I asked them a question: Would you find these same commitments in the athletic programs of public schools? Of course you would. And if that is the case, what exactly is the difference between a Christian school athletic program and a public school athletic program? Not much. Both programs preach effort. Both preach unselfish teamwork. Both preach belief.

The reason we don’t find much difference is because of warrant theology. In Christian school athletics we don’t change the goals. We change the warrant. We do the exact same things everyone else is doing. We just do them for different reasons.

The most common devotional talk in Christian athletic programs illustrates this point. A coach or chaplain will reflect on the Parable of the Talents. In the parable the servant who invests his talents is praised. The servant who buries his talent is chastised. In the hands of Christian athletics this becomes a message about effort and excellence. God has given you gifts, so you must be a good steward. You must give your best. You must maximize your opportunities.

Now, I’m not interested here in debating whether that’s the correct interpretation of the parable. I’m simply pointing out how it functions.

The goal of the talk is not to point toward a distinctive Christian telos. The goal is to keep the existing goal, excellence, while supplying it with a Christian warrant. We should pursue excellence because God wants us to be good stewards.

Now, to be clear, God does want us to be good stewards. And young people absolutely need the virtues shaped by effort, teamwork, and aspiration. I’m not denying any of that. But I challenged the coaches with this question: If Jesus only ever functions as the warrant, when do we ever stop to think about distinctively Christian outcomes? If all we do is baptize the same goals everyone else has, Christian athletic programs will never develop Christian distinctiveness. The goals remain the same. Only the justification changes.

A truly Christian athletic program would eventually have to ask a different question: What are we doing with our teams that only makes sense in light of our Christian commitments?

That question shifts the focus away from warrant theology and toward Christ-shaped goals.

Now return to the institutions of Christian higher education, where the dynamics of warrant theology often become even clearer.

I’m a professor at a Christian university, and one thing I’ve noticed over the years is that working at a Christian university often isn’t all that different from working at a public, secular university. To be sure, there are differences. We pray before departmental meetings. We sing hymns at faculty gatherings. We hold chapel services. Devotional language runs through campus life.

But much of this can feel performative. What makes the meeting “Christian” is that we tack on a prayer. What makes the mission statement “Christian” is the invocation of God. A lot of what makes a Christian university “Christian” is devotional and rhetorical. It is the language we sprinkle around our work and decision making. Work and decision making that often isn’t all that different from what happens at secular universities.

Let me put it this way. The “Christian” at a Christian university should affect the engine. It should shape how the car actually runs. But far too often the “Christian” feels more like the paint job, something that affects how the car looks from the outside.

If that’s the case, what is actually configuring the engine?

Christian universities exist in a highly competitive marketplace. Schools compete for students, prestige, grants, rankings, and reputation. As a result, Christian universities generally adopt the same metrics of success used throughout higher education. These metrics are usually gathered under a single banner: the pursuit of excellence.

We want higher rankings. We want larger enrollments. We want bigger endowments. We want productive faculty. We want winning athletic programs. We want research grants and institutional prestige.

And because these are the metrics shaping the system, life at a Christian university can start to feel remarkably similar to life at a public university. The tenure and promotion process looks the same. The institutional anxieties look the same. The strategic plans look the same.

This is where warrant theology quietly enters the picture.

Warrant theology provides the Christian justification for the pursuit of excellence. Jesus becomes the reason our rankings go up. Jesus becomes the reason our enrollments grow. Jesus becomes the reason our faculty publish and our teams win.

The result is predictable. The engine under the hood remains exactly the same as every other university in the marketplace. The only thing that changes is the paint job.

Now, to be clear, I am not suggesting that Christian universities should stop caring about enrollments, endowments, or academic quality. A university is still an institution that must survive financially. And no one wants professors who are incompetent teachers or unserious scholars.

The issue is not excellence itself. The issue is that warrant theology prevents Jesus from interrogating our definition of excellence.

When Jesus only functions as the reason we pursue excellence, we quietly default to the marketplace’s definition of excellence. We end up chasing the exact same metrics as everyone else.

But if Jesus were allowed to function not as the warrant but as the end, something interesting might happen. Jesus might begin to trouble our assumptions about success. Jesus might challenge our metrics. Jesus might force us to ask whether faithfulness, humility, service, reconciliation, and hospitality ought to count as institutional achievements in ways that don’t show up in rankings or revenue reports.

In other words, we might finally stop fussing about the paint job.

And start lifting the hood to take a hard look at the engine.

Jana and I followed the crowds to see Project Hail Mary this weekend. The movie was great, and we've been told the book is even better. So if you haven't yet seen the movie, you might want to read the book first.

A reflection about sacrifice prompted by the movie. A huge spoiler will be revealed, so, reader, be warned.

The huge "reveal" at the end of the movie is that Ryland Grace, the protagonist, is not a hero for being aboard the mission to save the world. Ryland was drugged and forced into a coma to be placed on the ship. He wakes up years later with amnesia, and only late in the game remembers how he had fearfully, even cowardly, rejected the offer to volunteer.

Why did Ryland refuse to sacrifice himself to save humankind?

Earlier in the movie, when discussing the "suicidal" mission with Commander Yao, Ryland expresses doubt about his own bravery. Yao tells him that bravery is not genetic, that you just need to "find someone to be brave for." Yao's comment sits at the heart of Ryland's moral failure. He didn't have anyone in his life to be brave for. Consequently, he placed his life, selfishly, above the lives of others—even the lives of all humanity.

It's a sobering moment for Ryland when he recovers this memory. But then, the story turns. In trying to secure the "predator" Taumoeba that will kill the sun-dimming Astrophage, Rocky risks his life—and almost dies—to save Ryland. Sitting beside Rocky and hoping he comes back to life, Ryland finally finds someone he'd be willing to die for.

And then, Ryland gets that chance. Ryland realizes that if he can't get Rocky important information about the Taumoeba, Rocky will die. But Ryland has only enough fuel to get home. If he turns around to save Rocky, he'll never make it back to Earth. Ryland chooses to save Rocky. He can finally step into being a hero. He can sacrifice because he's found someone to be brave for.

Which brings me to Jesus.

In Romans, Paul writes:

When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners. Now, most people would not be willing to die for an upright person, though someone might perhaps be willing to die for a person who is especially good. But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.

Ryland is willing to die for Rocky because Rocky is "especially good." And because we as viewers love Rocky so much, Ryland's sacrifice for Rocky is powerful and moving. It's easy for us to cheer a heroic sacrifice to save someone as lovely as Rocky. As Paul puts it, someone might be willing to die for Rocky. Ryland was.

But here's the gospel turn, my friends. What if Rocky was a jerk? What if Rocky was selfish and mean? What if Rocky was revealed to be Ryland's enemy? Well, there would be no way in hell Ryland—or you or me—would turn around and save that asshole.

And yet, that's what Christ did for us. As Will Campbell once put it, "We're all bastards but God loves us anyway."

If God saved only the Rocky's of the world there wouldn't be much hope for any of us. Jesus didn't come to save only the "especially good," and Rocky is, most definitely, especially good. 

Christ came to save all of us.

And that's the scandal of grace.

In 2021 I shared a series of reflections on Karen Kilby’s essay, “Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the Trinity.” At the time, I was sorting through the oft-repeated claim that “the Trinity is our social program.” 

In the years since, I’ve kept returning to Kilby’s argument. Her cautions about political projection—the temptation to baptize our preferred social visions with divine authority—have become even more compelling. I’ve also kept circling back to a question that remained unresolved at the time: whether, and in what sense, the Trinity carries positive social, relational, or political implications.

To start, we need to review the debate between classical versus social trinitarianism, and how social trinitarianism lead to the maxim "the Trinity is our social program."

Classical trinitarianism is notoriously abstract. The Nicene consensus insists that God is one substance (ousia) and three persons (hypostases). The doctrine of the immanent Trinity—the life of God in se—is complex, arcane, and difficult for most Christians to grasp. 

Social trinitarianism emerged in the last century in the work of theologians like Jürgen Moltmann and Miroslav Volf, partly as a response to the abstractions of classical trinitarian theology, but also to challenge the way that doctrine had historically been used to justify hierarchy, empire, and colonial projects. Its central move was to emphasize relationality: what binds the Trinity together is love, expressed dynamically in perichoresis, often described as the “divine dance” of mutual indwelling and self-giving. In this way, the Trinity became more than a metaphysical puzzle—it became a vision of harmonious, self-giving love, a pattern for human relationships and social life.

This relational vision is then pressed into the social and political sphere. If God is relational and communal, human communities should reflect this mutuality. Families, friendships, organizations, communities, and nations were called to emulate the Trinity’s pattern of existence. The slogan “the Trinity is our social program,” popularized by Miroslav Volf, expresses this vision. The Trinity becomes a source of moral and social inspiration, a model to which human institutions should conform.

It is against this background that Karen Kilby’s critique takes shape. 

According to Kilby, social trinitarians had made the doctrine tangible and compelling, but in doing so, they ran the risk of projection: reading their preferred politics into the divine life and then claiming God as the source and warrant of their political vision.

In her essay, Kilby traces the typical pattern this argument would take:

1. Introduce the Trinity as a society of persons:

“Most basically, social theorists propose that Christians should not imagine God on the model of some individual person or thing which has three sides, aspects, dimensions or modes of being; God is instead to be thought of as a collective, a group, or a society, bound together by the mutual love, accord and self-giving of its members.”

2. Make perichoresis attractive:

“God is presented as having a wonderful and wonderfully attractive inner life. I already mentioned Moltmann’s notion of ‘the most perfect and intense empathy’ existing between the persons. Another proponent… writes of the Trinity as ‘a zestful, wondrous community of divine light, love, joy, mutuality and verve,’ where there is ‘no isolation, no insulation, no secretiveness, no fear of being transparent to another.’”

3. Project social ideals onto the world:

“In the hands of these thinkers, then, the claim that God though three is yet one becomes a source of metaphysical insight and a resource for combating individualism, patriarchy and oppressive forms of political and ecclesiastical organization… not a philosophical stumbling block but something with which to transform the world.”

Again, Kilby calls this a problem of projection. We project our preferred social and political visions onto God—and then turn around and claim God’s inner life as a justification for those same visions:

“Projection, then, is particularly problematic… because what is projected onto God is immediately reflected back onto the world, and this reverse projection is said to be what is in fact important about the doctrine.”

Kilby's caution here is prophetic. She concludes:

“Theologians are… free to speculate about social or any other kind of analogies to the Trinity. But they should not… claim for their speculations the authority that the doctrine carries within the Christian tradition, nor should they use the doctrine as a pretext for claiming such an insight into the inner nature of God that they can use it to promote social, political or ecclesiastical regimes.”

Let me give a concrete example of how this projection works. For example, some theologians argue that democratic socialism is more relational and mutual than free-market capitalism. From there, it becomes “trinitarian”: socialism is read as more aligned with the pattern of love and mutuality in the Trinity, while capitalism is cast as less so. A straight line is drawn from the Trinity to a particular political arrangement. To be clear, my sympathies are more socialistic than capitalistic. So I like this line of argument. But I'm alert to Kilby's caution and concern about how “the Trinity is our social program” can be used to give divine sanction to preferred political positions, turning the Trinity into a mirror of my politics. 

Kilby’s alternative is apophatic trinitarianism. Apophatic theology emphasizes God’s mystery, the impossibility of speaking definitively about God, and the way human descriptions inevitably fall short. Kilby writes:

“The doctrine of the Trinity… does not need to be seen as a descriptive, first order teaching… It can instead be taken as grammatical, as a second order proposition, a rule… for how to read the Biblical stories, how to speak about some of the characters… how to deploy the ‘vocabulary’ of Christianity in an appropriate way… its importance lies in structuring Christianity rather than providing a picture of God’s nature.”

Her point is sobering. Human analogies—perichoresis as a divine dance, love as a model for human society—can be beautiful, but they can never be literal. Even John of Damascus, after describing perichoresis, concludes:

“It is impossible for this to be found in any created nature.”

This is where Kilby haunts me and why I keep returning to her essay. Do we get too literal, too cozy, too confident in drawing direct lines from the Trinity to politics? Kilby's apophatic approach is a powerful reminder that idolatry remains a constant temptation whenever we speak about God, especially for political purposes. As Kilby remarks in her talk "Trinity and Politics: An Apophatic Approach" this is actually one political takeaway from her position, that we should be wary of any totalizing political system and ideology. She says:

If one cultivates an awareness of the ungraspability of God, the impossibility of finding an image, or model, or integrating vision of the the Trinity, if one cultivates the capacity to live with questions to which we have no answers, might this be correlated, not with a particular political commitment to one form of socio-economic system or another, to one social vision or another, but with a resistance to an absolute confidence in any system and any social vision? Economic and political regimes do, after all, tend to take on a sacred aura. They tend to demand unconditional commitment, to imagine themselves as the end and goal of history. If Christians are schooled by the doctrine of the Trinity, as well as in other ways, to know that God is not within our grasp, that we possess no concept or overarching understanding of that which is highest, then we are in a sense schooled into suspicion of systems that present themselves with a kind of sacred, all-encompassing necessity.

So might we not imagine that an important political contribution of Christian thinking about God be then, not that it provides us with something like a shortcut to formulating a distinct alternative of our own, but that it helps us call in question, helps relativize, all such systems that we find we might be enticed by? Might there not be a correspondence, in other words, between a resistance to idolatry in relation to God and a resistance to ideology in relation to political systems?

This is excellent, and a much-needed reminder. But it still leaves the pressing question: does the Trinity have any positive social, relational, or political implications? Kilby’s apophatic trinitarianism makes me nervous because, if pushed too far, it risks rendering the Trinity morally, socially, and politically inert—precisely the problem she is trying to resist. If the Trinity becomes an apophatic vacuum, it can be co-opted or ignored, deployed to justify almost anything. The apophaticism of the Trinity would promote political quietude, allowing it to exist comfortably alongside any regime, good or evil. If the Trinity has nothing to say about our politics, then anything goes.

In the face of this concern, I do think there is a way to connect the Trinity to our politics, and Kilby herself points the way. She is correct that words like perichoresis give us no window into what the Trinity is in se. This is an observation about the immanent Trinity, the mystery of God’s very life. But that’s not all we have when it comes to the Trinity. We also have the economic Trinity—the revealed and visible actions of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in salvation history.

In short, I think Kilby is wrong to assume that we are only ever drawing from human models of love and relationality and then projecting those onto the Trinity. Of course, we do this a lot, and whenever we do, we risk idolatry, using God to justify our preferred politics. But that’s not all we are doing. When I think about God, I am mostly engaging with the revealed actions of the economic Trinity to understand what the immanent Trinity might be like. Rahner's rule applies: The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity. To be sure, this is a fraught process—temptations to idolatry lurk on every side—but when it comes to the Love that exists between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, something of that Love has come into view in Jesus Christ. And that Love, I would argue, gives us a glimpse of what perichoresis might be like. Not because it exists in any created thing, but because the Trinity has entered into human history and made itself visible.

Having made itself visible, I think we can most definitely say that this Love carries relational, social, and political implications. Kilby herself gestures toward this in her talk “Trinity and Politics,” where she focuses on the Incarnation and the political implications of first-hand engagement with brokenness and suffering. Her point is subtle, and it stays true to her apophatic approach: Jesus’ engagement with oppression does not yield concrete policy proposals. Politics at a given time and place are too historically and contextually dependent. But what Jesus’ engagement does reveal—and reveals to me as I follow him to the cross—is a clear sense of what is broken and dislocated in the world.

As Kilby points out, we are never lacking in totalizing systems or high-altitude analyses. Political think tanks abound. Elites always have answers about how to fix the world. The trouble isn’t that we lack political opinions, it’s that our opinions often lack a direct, gritty engagement with what is actually happening “on the streets.” Following Jesus to the cross keeps me on the streets, close to the suffering, close to the people and stories that are often invisible in centers of power. Phrased simply, my politics is blind without the cross.

Thus, I would describe Kilby’s approach as an incarnational politics—a politics that starts with, and stays close to, the suffering and pain of the world. Yes, there may be diverse and competing policy proposals about how to ameliorate that suffering, but an incarnational politics keeps my attention focused on this hurt and perpetually engaged in its healing.

All that to say, when it comes to politics, Kilby turns to the economic Trinity. Grounded in the Incarnation, I would argue that there is a Trinitarian politics. And while this does not give me concrete, one-size-fits-all policy prescriptions, it does shape how I engage politically in the world: humble, attentive to the hurt, close to the pain, incarnational, and rooted in the Love revealed in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Jana and I have long loved the music of Rich Mullins. In college we got to see him in concert, which he preformed in a white t-shirt, torn jeans, and barefoot. I was smitten! 

We loved not just his music, but his life and witness. Rich Mullins was a pilgrim who embodied a restless search for God amid the failures of institutional Christianity and his own personal brokenness. 

I was recently listening to Andrew Peterson's live concert album celebrating the music of Rich Mullins (on Spotify here and Apple Music here). I was interrupted by Peterson's cover of "Calling Out Your Name." (You can listen to the original here on YouTube. And here is Peterson's cover, from a different live album, on YouTube.)

What interrupted me by Peterson's cover of "Calling Out Your Name" was the poetry of the lyrics. Weeping by the time I reached the end of the song, I felt to myself, "That's an Easter hymn."

"Calling Out Your Name" by Rich Mullins

Well the moon moved past Nebraska
And spilled laughter on them cold Dakota Hills
And angels danced on Jacob's stairs
Yeah, they danced on Jacob's stairs
There is this silence in the Badlands
And over Kansas the whole universe was stilled
By the whisper of a prayer
The whisper of a prayer

And a single hawk bursts into flight
And in the east the whole horizon is in flames
I feel thunder in the sky
I see the sky about to rain
And I hear the prairies calling out Your name

I can feel the earth tremble
Beneath the rumbling of the buffalo hooves
And the fury in the pheasant's wings
And there's fury in a pheasant's wings
And it tells me the Lord is in His temple
And there is still a faith that can make the mountains move
And a love that can make the heavens ring
And I've seen love make heaven ring

Where the sacred rivers meet
Beneath the shadow of the Keeper of the Plains
I feel thunder in the sky
I see the sky about to rain
And I hear the prairies calling out Your name

From the place where morning gathers
You can look sometimes forever 'til you see
What time may never know
What time may never know
How the Lord takes by its corners this old world
And shakes us forward and shakes us free
To run wild with the hope
To run wild with the hope

The hope that this thirst will not last long
That it will soon drown in a song not sung in vain
And I feel thunder in the sky
I see the sky about to rain
And I hear the prairies calling out Your name

And I know this thirst will not last long
That it will soon drown in the song not sung in vain
I feel thunder in the sky
I see the sky about to rain
And with the prairies I am calling out Your name

The Lord has taken this old world by its corners, shaking us forward and shaking us free. 

Christ is risen!

May you run wild with the hope. 

"Praise him, sun and moon; praise him, all you shining stars."

Psalm 148 is a song of cosmic praise. Structurally, we behold a layered cosmos. The song begins in the heavens:

Praise the Lord from the heavens.

And then we move toward the earth:

Praise the Lord from the earth.

While in the heavens, celestial beings are called upon to praise the Lord: angels, the heavenly armies, the sun and moon, the stars, the highest heavens, and the waters above the heavens. 

On earth, all terrestrial beings are called to praise: sea monsters, ocean depths, lightning, hail, snow, clouds, and stormy winds, mountains and hills, fruit and cedar trees, wild animals and cattle, creeping animals and birds. Lastly, the whole of human society is called to praise: kings of the earth and all peoples, princes and judges, young men and women, the old and young together.

What strikes the reader is the anthropomorphism of creation. The stars giving praise. The sun giving praise. Oceans giving praise. Animals giving praise. Storms giving praise. Trees giving praise. Mountains giving praise. 

Earlier in this series on the Psalms I described how the imagery of the Psalms opens up the possibility of a baptized paganism, viewing the powers of nature, visible and invisible, as subject to the lordship of Christ. I shared how C.S. Lewis presents a vision of this baptized paganism in The Chronicles of Narnia. It's worth sharing again this lovely illustration from The Magician's Nephew where the children bear witness to Aslan creating the world:

The Lion opened his mouth, but no sound came from it; he was breathing out, a long, warm breath; it seemed to sway all the beasts as the wind sways a line of trees. Far overhead from beyond the veil of blue sky which hid them the stars sang again; a pure, cold, difficult music. Then there came a swift flash like fire (but it burnt nobody) either from the sky or from the Lion itself, and every drop of blood tingled in the children’s bodies, and the deepest, wildest voice they had ever heard was saying: “Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters."

It was of course the Lion's voice. The children had long felt sure that he could speak: yet it was a lovely and terrible shock when he did. Out of the trees wild people stepped forth, gods Fauns and Satyrs and Dwarfs. Out of the river rose the river god with his Naiad daughters. And all these and all the beasts and birds in their different voices, low or high or thick or clear, replied:

“Hail, Aslan. We hear and obey. We are awake. We love. We think. We speak. We know.”

Lewis is here blending nature mysticism with Christianity. Creation is alive and awake. And because alive and awake, capable of the praise we behold in Psalm 148. 

Praise the Lord, shining stars. Praise the Lord, every tree. Praise the Lord, sun and moon. Praise the Lord, all you seas. 

Last post in this quixotic series trying to get people to cozy up to the word “impassibility.”

To start, let me just say this by way of clarification. God “knows” and “experiences” our pain. As the Ground of our being, God is intimately present to every human experience. God is closer to your pain than you are. God holds our tears in existence. God holds our blood in his hands. Blood and tears could not exist without this intimate connection. So if your heart aches, God is not distant from that ache, but present to it more deeply than you can comprehend. The issue here concerns the way God knows and experiences in contrast to our own. The debate about God’s impassibility isn’t about whether God “knows” or “experiences” our pain, but the mode of that knowledge and experience. We are tempted to imagine God’s knowledge as if God possessed a biological nervous system, undergoing emotional reactions in a cause-and-effect sequence. But that is a mistake. God doesn’t have an amygdala. The mode of God’s intimacy with our pain and suffering is beyond our comprehension. The claim of classical theism is simply that God’s intimacy with our pain does not introduce change within the divine being, given that our pain is already held within and sustained by God’s very life. Phrased differently, God is not a bounded object in the midst of other bounded objects who collide in competitive zero-sum interactions. God is not a limbic billiard ball. God is what holds your limbic system in being. Given that ontic intimacy, you can be sure God knows what you’re feeling. That you can feel anything at all is because God gifts you those feelings.

Still, as I mentioned in the last post, there are a lot of people who really want God to experience feelings and emotions as if God possessed a nervous system, because feelings and emotions are experienced within human love relationships.

In response, it might be helpful to ponder what we mean by a “love relationship.” Are we imagining some tortured, stormy, and turbulent love affair? Or are we imagining love as steady commitment, care, and fidelity?

To be sure, many famous contemplatives in the tradition leaned into the passionate and erotic in their relationship with God. The soul ecstatically yearning for God like a lover longing for the beloved. And that passionate relationship has its moments of desolation, as described by St. John of the Cross in The Dark Night of the Soul. But God is never imagined as an unfaithful or unreliable lover. There is a passionate intensity in the relationship, and all the drama that entails, but God as lover remains faithful and true. Once again, this is the good news of divine impassibility. God is not an inconstant, cold, abusive, or unfaithful spouse. In the marital union with God, the soul is safe with the Beloved.

Most of us, though, experience our love relationship with God as a parental relation, paternal and maternal. Here the experience is less a torrid love affair than one of constant nurture and care. The pathos of God’s emotions shifts toward the delight and dismay a parent feels toward a child. Here our conversation becomes less entangled in God’s “feelings,” because in this parental framework the definition of love shifts away from emotions toward commitment. What defines parental love as parental love is not the storm of its passions but the unconditionality of its acceptance and care. Which is precisely what is highlighted by the good news of God’s impassibility, the constancy of God’s love.

And this is also true for the romantic and marital framework described above. In the marital relation, turbulent and infatuated passions settle down into sacrificial care and lifelong fidelity. Like parental love, as marital love matures it becomes less characterized by emotional infatuation than by relational commitment. Once again, notice how that issue--relational constancy--keeps coming up. The good news of divine impassibility.

In short, the pathos of love is less about turbulent emotional swings between two unsteady lovers than about the fierceness of a relational commitment, like a parent’s love for a child or the love found in a lifelong marital union. God’s feelings and emotions are always expressions of that fierce relational commitment, the constancy of God’s love and care. Because of our unsteadiness and inconstancy, there is a drama and pathos to God’s relational commitment, and we describe that drama and pathos using the language of emotions as analogies of relation. But that relation is loving precisely because it doesn’t wobble or change.

This has been a key point I’ve been trying to make. Love shouldn’t be “emotional.” Because emotions are, by definition, variable and volatile. We know this. When we describe someone as “very emotional,” we are not describing a steady, constant person. A “very emotional” person is an unpredictable person. In a similar way, we don’t want an “emotional” God. It is not good news if God is a hot, unpredictable mess. True love, we know, loves despite emotion. So this whole debate about whether God has “feelings” or “emotions” is really a waste of time, because what is good news in this debate isn’t the emotionality of God but God’s constant posture of commitment and love. And it’s this constant posture that makes the doctrine of God’s impassibility such good news.

To wrap this series up, let me just confess to a degree of perversity on my part. Regular readers are aware of my contrariness, my delight in sticking up for unpopular ideas and going against popular trends. Shoot, I’ve defended the prosperity gospel! So it’s not overly strange that I’d be defending an idea that many people find repulsive and cold. So, what’s the win here, for me? I shared that win in a Substack Note yesterday:

So, I’m in the middle of a three-part series about “The Good News of God’s Impassibility.” This rehabilitation of divine impassibility is a quixotic provocation on my part, and it unsettles progressive Christians. But here’s what I’d like to say: Friends, can you not see that, when you argue for God’s “emotionality,” it is through that very door the “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon will walk, along with visions of God’s “wrath” being “satisfied” upon the cross? Can you not see how, in your embrace of an “emotional” God, you are aiding and abetting all that you say you oppose? If so, join me in closing this door.

And if you claim that, by “emotion” all we always and ever mean is love, well, can you not see you agree with me already?