As I have written many times, the problem here lies with the word impassible. When we hear it, we assume it means that God is emotionally distant or unresponsive. But that is not what impassibility means within classical theism. To say that God is impassible is simply to say that God is not emotionally conflicted or turbulent. As I have said recently, it means that God is not a hot mess.
The key point is to remember that God is love. So when we say that God is impassible, we are saying that God’s love never wavers or changes. God’s love is never conflicted or hesitant.
The irony is that open, process, and relational theologians actually agree with this claim. When they describe God as constant and unchanging in love, they are affirming precisely what classical theism means by divine impassibility. God’s love does not suffer violent emotional swings from wrath to love. This is why, as I have recently argued, classical theism stands in tension with versions of penal substitutionary atonement that posit a change in God’s emotional posture toward us as a result of Jesus’ death on the cross.
Theologically stated, when we confess that "God is love" we are confessing that God is passion but not passible.
Further, because God is love God’s posture toward us is always and essentially relational. Because God is love, God is open and responsive to our choices and actions. Just like a loving parent is in a responsive and dynamic relationship with their child. Acting our unfolding life story, God engages with us in an ongoing, attentive, particular, dynamic, relational responsiveness. But this dynamic and unfolding back and forth does not imply God's love experience affective fluctuations. So let me say this clearly: God's impassability has nothing to do with God's relationality. Relationality and emotionality are two different issues, and we need to keep them separate.
So, the issue regarding God’s impassibility is not whether God is relational. The issue is whether that relationship is safe. The constant and unchanging love of the parent is what keeps the dynamic parent/child relationship from curdling into something dark or abusive. For the relationship to remain healthy and safe, the child can be a hot mess, but the parent cannot be. And that is precisely the good news of divine impassibility: God’s constant posture of love.
I have said all this before. And yet, people still want to hold onto the view that God has emotions. I do understand the appeal, given that human love is experienced as pathos. From the Greek πάθος (páthos), pathos means “to suffer,” “to undergo,” or “to experience.” Consequently, if God is love, would not God’s love display pathos? Would not God suffer, undergo, and experience love just as we do? There is a romantic longing on our part to answer in the affirmative. We want to experience our love affair with God as a relationally symmetrical experience.
Again, I sympathize with this desire. But let me underline the key point. By divine pathos, we never envision God suffering, undergoing, or experiencing His side of this love affair in a way that changes His love. Underneath all these relational and passionate visions of God is the confession of divine impassibility, that God’s love never changes.
To illustrate this, we need only ask a simple diagnostic question of any description of God's emotional life. In God’s love affair with humanity, can God suffer to such a degree, or undergo an experience so great or extreme, that God could or would come to renounce or reject His love for us? That is, is there a pathos that God could experience in His love that would cause God to reject us as an object of His love?
My strong suspicion is that the answer would be “No.” And if so, all the suffering, undergoing, and experiencing in the pathos of God is not putting God’s divine impassibility at risk. And this has been my point. By “pathos,” you do not really mean a change in God’s love. And since God’s love never changes, no matter what human persons might do, we are right back to the good news of classical theism:
God’s divine impassibility.
