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?
