In the last post I argued that God’s impassibility is good news. God is love, and God’s love never changes no matter what humans might do. That is good news.
And yet, there is some predictable pushback here.
The first is from a pagan, anthropomorphic reading of the Bible. That is to say, we imagine God the way the ancient pagans imagined their gods, as having psychological lives just like humans. Think of the gods in a Percy Jackson novel or movie. In this pagan approach to Scripture, when we read about God’s “wrath” or about God “repenting” of an action, we treat that language as a straightforward expression of human-like psychology.
Classical theism rejects this pagan way of imagining God. God is not like Zeus or Odin. The emotions of pagan deities were as unpredictable and unstable as human emotions. Just like us, the gods of paganism were a hot mess.
Beyond a pagan reading of the Bible, another objection to divine impassibility is that some people just really want God to have feelings, as feelings are the very stuff of affection and relationality. There is a strong desire for God to have emotions, no matter what classical theism might say.
I sympathize with this desire, but I want to keep hammering away at the point that when people express this desire for God to have emotions and feelings, they generally limit God’s feelings to the positive. God feels joy, love, and pleasure with us. People do not, as a rule, wish God hated them. In short, this desire for God to “be emotional” or “have feelings” is really just a shell game for the confession that God is constant love. Sure, we change the adjectives to make it seem that God has “different feelings”--delight, kindness, love, joy--but we are still in the word cloud of “God is love.”
Another concern comes from biblical literalism. As mentioned above, biblical literalists point out how God’s “wrath” is described in Scripture. Conservative readers of the Bible are right to draw our attention to these texts, and they are comfortable reading these emotional descriptions as literal depictions of God’s inner life. But for many progressive readers of the Bible this is, to put it mildly, a really odd and frequently hypocritical move. For example, open, process, and relational theologies aren’t known for their biblical literalism. Just ask them how they read Genesis 1 in light of modern science. And yet, these same folks, when it comes to emotional descriptions of God, suddenly become as literalistic as the fundamentalists. There’s just no good reason to imagine that the emotional descriptions of God in Scripture are literal depictions of God possessing a human-like psychology. A wee bit of apophaticism would do a world of good for the open, process, and relational folks given their biblical literalism. As pointed out above, these literalistic readings are pagan depictions of God.
Lastly, people will point to depictions of Jesus’ emotional life as somehow refuting God’s divine impassibility. A little church of history would help here. This issues was decisively dealt with at the Council of Chalcedon, which asserted that Jesus is one person with two natures, and that the two natures exist “without confusion.” That is to say, according to Chalcedon, the human nature of Jesus, which is passible, is not mixed or confused with his divine nature, which is impassible. Rather, the two natures remain distinct and unmixed even as they are united in the one person of Christ.
Stepping back, I have written about all this before. What I have suggested, in response to many of the above concerns, is that the emotional language in Scripture describes our relation to God’s love. For example, “joy” and “delight” describe the relation of righteousness to love. By contrast, “wrath” and “disapproval” describe the relation of unrighteousness to love. As classical theists maintain, love remains constant, but our relation to love changes based upon our choices, and we describe that relation using the language of emotions and feelings.
Here is a simple metaphor. Imagine fire. If you stand close to the fire, you describe that relation as “warm.” As you move farther from the fire, you describe that relation as “cold.” The fire remains the same, but your experience of the fire, warm or cold, changes depending upon how close you are standing. In a similar way, our experience of God--joy or anger--expresses how close to or far away from God we are standing. If we are close to God, we experience the relation as “joy” and “delight.” But if we are standing far away from God, we experience the relation as “wrath” and “displeasure.”
Given how this relation can change in light of our actions, we speak of God’s emotions as an analogy. God is described as “pleased” or “angry” not because he undergoes emotional swings like humans do, his countenance changing from stormy to sunny. Rather, emotional language conveys an analogy of relation.
And the good news is that you’re always in a relation with love.
