I. Covenant Lord or Stoic Sage?
It is the Sh’ma and not pantheistic Stoicism that emphasizes the sole lordship of YHWH as king. And it is precisely Israel’s narrative identity, constantly reasserted, of having been slaves liberated from bondage and taken into God’s care as a community founded on a covenant rather than racial and social hierarchies that makes this God’s sole kingship the basis for freedom in contrast to the nations.
In fact, it is important to remember that the point of having no other king than YHWH was to guard Israel itself from the oppressive hierarchies of the nations. The laws given to Israel defy the traditional social, economic and racial stratifications of their neighbors. The judges applied this law. But before long, Israel wanted a king “like the nations” (Dt 17:14). “Yet that the step was taken almost tentatively and, on the part of some, with great reluctance is likewise not surprising,” writes John Bright, “for monarchy was an institution totally foreign to Israel’s tradition.”3 Even in God’s concession to a monarchy, strict limitations were to be placed on royal power: the ruler “must not acquire many horses for himself” or wives or “silver and gold…in great quantities for himself” and above all must school himself in the law, “neither exalting himself above other members of the community nor turning aside from the commandment…” (Dt 17:14-20). It had after all been the covenant Israel made with YHWH at Sinai that had made an earthly king of the confederacy unnecessary and perhaps even disloyal. As early as the first king (Saul), the saga of corrupt power taints Israel’s history. YHWH’s status as Israel’s sole king was not the validation to the rise of oppressive hierarchies, but their rival.
Suzerainty treaties assumed that the suzerain or lord of the covenant was independent of obligation, except to the suzerain’s own aims and objectives. However, once the suzerain accepts self-imposed obligations on the vassal’s behalf, the suzerain’s character is on trial. The suzerain must be reliable. This is also an assumption of the biblical narrative with respect to YHWH.
The so-called incommunicable attributes specify characteristics unique to God, attributions that cannot even analogically be said to describe creatures. Since most of the biblical evidence falls on the side of God’s analogical self-disclosure in the narrative of a covenant, the incommunicable attributes are understandably the most susceptible to philosophical abstraction and speculation.4 Historically, they are also the most dependent on the viae negationis and eminentiae, since they are expressions of divine transcendence—hence, the recurring alpha-privative as a prefix (aseity, apatheia, impassibility, immutability, independence, infinity) and the superlative (“omni”) prefix (omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence). It is no doubt true that the so-called metaphysics of perfection / infinitude can easily end up justifying Feuerbach’s theory of religion as projection. That which constitutes an ideal or perfect being varies, of course, and we do not achieve much in the way of identifying the God of biblical revelation by substituting a priori definitions. One important difference between the Thomist and Reformed approaches to analogy is that the latter is suspicious of the claim that we can know what God is not any more than we can know what God is, apart from God’s own self-disclosure in revelation. We cannot start with our idea of perfect being, in either a way of eminence or negation.
However, the challenge for us today is to patiently attend to what the Christian tradition has meant to claim by appealing to these predicates without immediately dismissing them as a metaphysics of presence/infinitude in the light of modern philosophy (especially Descartes, Spinoza and German idealism). The criticism of the classical Christian doctrine of God as “metaphysical” (specifically, Stoic) was launched by the Socinians in the sixteenth century and reached its zenith in the post-Kantian theologies of Ritschl and Harnack.5 This charge has underwritten a century of modern theology, not only in neo-Protestantism but in neo-orthodoxy and in the version of the “biblical theology” movement identified especially with G. E. Wright. According to Wright, the God of systematic theology was the deity of static order, while the God of biblical theology is dynamic, a claim that seems to ignore the different objectives of theological sub-disciplines (systematics being concerned with logical connections and biblical theology interested in organic and historical development).6 But the twentieth century, especially through the work of Barth and Brunner, also witnessed the rehabilitation of the sixteenth-century reformers in this respect, shifting the blame for “Hellenistic” theology to their systematizing successors instead.7 In a chapter of Most Moved Mover titled, “Overcoming a Pagan Influence,” evangelical theologian Clark Pinnock takes this well-traveled road, but with the entire classical tradition from the church fathers to current orthodoxy dismissed in one stroke as hopelessly trapped in ancient paganism.8 This does not keep Pinnock, any more than Harnack, from reading scripture through the lens of modern thought, especially Hegel, in addition to Teilhard de Chardin and Alfred North Whitehead, a debt that Pinnock readily acknowledges.9 But in this case the philosophical debt is evidently justified, since “modern culture…is closer to the biblical view than classical theism.”10
More recently, however, this thesis has been unraveling. On the biblical-theological side, James Barr led the way to its demise11 and subsequent research has raised serious questions
about its viability: in relation to Jesus (Hebrew) vs. Paul (Greek)12 and the Reformers vs. the Protestant scholastics.13 In fact, although he himself rejects divine simplicity, immutability and impassibility, William P. Alston demonstrates that for Aquinas and others, the whole point of affirming these predicates was to avoid any kind of substance metaphysics.14 Traditionally, Christian theology has emphasized as a corollary of the creator-creature distinction God’s independence, expressed by a cluster of predicates such as simplicity (i.e., not a composite being made up of various parts), immutability (unchangeableness), impassibility (immunity to suffering), and aseity (independence).
In some biblical passages the doctrinal gold is lying on the surface of the text. Interestingly, this occurs often in doxological passages such as 1 Tim 6:15-16: “who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.” More often, we draw necessary conclusions from God’s characteristic behavior in biblical narratives. From throbbing verbs emerge consistent adverbs and stable nouns.
Taking the “strong verbs” disclosed in the narrative of the covenant trial as our starting point, nothing could be clearer to the covenant people in both testaments than God’s self-existence, independence and uniqueness. It is basic to the transcendence of YHWH in contrast to the idols of the nations. Psalm 115:3 is typical: “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases.” Hence, the recurring polemic against the idols: “To whom will you liken me and make me equal, and compare me, that we may be alike?…Remember this and stand firm, recall it to mind, your transgressors, remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand and I will accomplish all my purpose…” (Is. 46:5, 8-10). YHWH is in a class by himself. There is no genus of “deity” to which he belongs, a whatness of which God is an instance.
To whom will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him?…It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretched out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing…Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless (Is. 40:21-23, 28-29).
It is precisely because God—and only God—has life and sovereignty in himself that the weak and powerless can cry out to him in their distress. Evil powers never have the last word.
While Exodus 3:14 is inconclusive for drawing sophisticated doctrines of aseity and eternity, Revelation 1:4 (drawing, no doubt, on the LXX translation of Ex 3:14) at least points in the direction of something like aseity and eternity, referring to the Son as “the one who is, and was and is to come (ho on, kai ho en, kai ho erchomenos), the Almighty.” Being is not antecedent to God or a predicate shared with creatures: “Just as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself…” (Jn 5:26). Scripture repeats the constant refrain that the world is dependent on God, while God is dependent on no one and no thing. Surrounded by Epicurean deists and Stoic pantheists, Paul glosses Isaiah 40 along with some Greek poets (Ac 17:24-28). In this passage divine transcendence is not set against immanence, but is the very presupposition for it. The distinction between creator and creature is not an ontological opposition: it is precisely in God’s independence and freedom from contingency that a habitable space is opened for the freedom of contingent reality. If the world is not God’s body, it is certainly God’s house. This reverses panentheism: “God indwells all,” not “all indwells God”; thus God is necessarily independent and yet contingently related to the world. The necessary relations of the Trinity cannot be univocally applied to the God-world relationship.
Perhaps among the most conclusive arguments for God’s infinite perfection and independence is the fact that nothing can be given to him or done for him by a creature that demands reimbursement: “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen” (Ro. 11:34-6). The human analogy here is once again the suzerainty treaty: the suzerain owes nothing to the vassal but freely and sovereignly establishes a relationship of genuine, if hierarchical, mutuality. To assert absolute perfection, then, is to recognize that God is free of all limitations and containments (1 Kings 8:27). It is not even that he is infinitely extended in space (pace Spinoza) but that he transcends space (and, as we will argue, time)—even as God indwells both more fully (repletively) than any creature. This is one of those mysteries that we are expected to accept without demanding philosophical resolution or synthesis.
All created reality is contingent upon the necessary existence of God without being swallowed up in that necessity. As Herman Bavinck notes, this “unbounded, limitless, absolutely undetermined, unqualified” view of God is irreconcilable with pantheism ancient and modern: Babylonian, Hellenistic, Neo-Platonist, kabbalistic and Spinozistic.15 Possessing every virtue in an absolute degree, perfect, God’s infinitude is qualitative, not quantitative; intensive, and extensive; positive, not negative.16 God’s infinity cannot mean that he can be anything or everything (pace Ockham and Hegel), unbounded and absolutely undetermined, because his attributes are descriptive of his being itself. In other words, God is bound by his nature, but only by his nature. But just so, God is bound to us (better, has bound himself to us) by a free decision to enter into covenant with us and with the whole creation. God is not free to act contrary to such covenantal guarantees because doing so would entail the violation not only of his decision but of his nature, particularly his faithfulness. God’s infinite perfection is his greatness: “Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and of his greatness there is no end” (Ps. 145:3). And all of these biblical references to God’s incomparable perfection have concrete historical events as their frame of reference. In the prophets, for example, YHWH invites the covenant people to a trial of the gods: can they speak and act as YHWH has done? “Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field, and they cannot speak; they have to be carried, for they cannot walk. Do not be afraid of them, for they cannot do evil, nor is it in them to do good. There is none like you, O LORD; you are great, and your name is great in might” (Jer. 10:5-6).
God can be wholly identified with his revelation without being entirely reduced to it: this is the point of analogy and incarnation, and it is the point of the doctrine of aseity. In every identification, God is always that and yet not that. While the absolute and the personal are antithetical concepts in ancient Greek paganism and in modern (idealist) philosophy, they find their unity in the God of Israel.17
Since there is no predicate of being univocally shared by God and creatures, God’s freedom is qualitatively and not simply quantitatively different from our own. This is where Barth’s affirmation of both freedom from (transcendence) and freedom for (immanence) is so crucial: “But freedom in its positive and proper qualities means to be grounded in one’s being, to be determined and moved by oneself.”18 This once more affirms God’s self-determination and aseity.19 But it must not be defined only negatively (independence from conditions), but positively—as God’s unique freedom to enter into fellowship and so freely will to be conditioned.20 The purely negative likely originates in a neo-platonism in which to enter into such fellowship is a sign of less being.21 It is not a generic freedom that we then apply to the gods or God, but the freedom proved in Jesus Christ.22 To say that God is a se, “we say that (as manifest and eternally actual in the relationship of Father, Son and Holy Ghost) He is the One who already has in Himself everything which would have to be the object of His creation and causation if He were not He, God. Because He is God, as such He already has His own being.”23
On no point is the challenge to a traditional understanding of divine perfection more forcefully elaborated today than the concept of impassibility. Traditionally regarded as an implication of divine perfection, the notion of God’s immunity to suffering is now frequently seen rather to be an implication of a certain presupposition of perfection defined by Greek metaphysics rather than by scripture.
T. E. Fretheim’s The Suffering of God was formative in raising this question in biblical theology. The biblical writers, he argued, used the metaphor not only in an emotive sense but as “reality depicting.”24 (The contrast of metaphor with “reality-depicting language” already assumes a fundamental misunderstanding of language, we would argue.)25 Fretheim recognizes the twin dangers of agnostic equivocity and rationalistic univocity. The metaphors are metaphors or analogies, he realizes. Nevertheless, they need to be taken seriously as
revealing something important about God’s very nature; otherwise, why call them revelation at all?26 But, as Childs observes, Fretheim assumes “that a biblical metaphor always arises from the projection of human experience to a depiction of the divine…A. Heschel (The Prophets, II, 51f.) correctly senses the problem when he writes: ‘God’s unconditional concern for justice is not an anthropomorphism. Rather, man’s concern for justice is a theomorphism.’” While in the history of religions, Fretheim might be right, “according to Israel’s scriptures this is blasphemy. God, not man, is the only creator.”27 Second, Childs judges that Fretheim’s “organismic image” of the mutual interdependence of God and humans is more indebted to process thought than to the dynamic movement of revelation.
God is self-contained: ‘I am Yahweh’ (Ex. 6.2). ‘I am who I am’ (3.14). There is none like him (Ex. 8.10; 15.11; Ps. 86.8). He is God alone (Deut. 4.35; II Kings 19.15). His love is everlasting (Jer. 31.3). God does not from necessity need Israel (Ps. 50.10ff), but rather willed not to exist for himself alone. In full freedom for his own purpose, God loves unconditionally with an utterly sovereign love. James’ witness is fully Jewish in depicting God as ‘the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change’ (1.17; cf. Job 28.24; Ecclus. 42.18-20; Wisd. 1.5ff).28
Although as “Living God” and not a static concept, God suffers with and for his people (Is. 63:9), the fact remains that “God is God and not human (Hos. 11.9), yet he has become ‘God with us’ (Isa. 8.10).”29 And he is God-with-us not only in the incarnation, but already in anticipation of the incarnation as creator, sustainer, liberator and Lord.
On the one hand, the true God is not different from the God we meet in Jesus Christ. On the other hand, we must not simply collapse God into Jesus—or, for that matter, God’s incomprehensible being and his being with us in the historical economy. One of the reasons Philippians 2 is so revolutionary is that a person of the Trinity humbles himself to assume our humanity, though without any change in his divine nature. The incarnation is where God becomes weak for us in our humanity even while remaining immune to suffering in his divine nature. We should beware of views that render the incarnation merely an instance of a general phenomenon that goes on quite well without it. Furthermore, they fail to take into account the fact that as covenantal, God’s relation to the world is just as much an ontological fact as it is in rival accounts, but as such it underscores the important truth that God enters into covenants rather than being constituted in his very being by them.
No one has provided a more thorough criticism of impassibility in systematic theology along these lines of a general divine kenosis than Jürgen Moltmann. He asks, “How can Christian faith understand Christ’s passion as being the revelation of God, if the deity cannot suffer?…If God is incapable of suffering, then—if we are to be consistent—Christ’s passion can only be viewed as a human tragedy.”30 “If, in the manner of Greek philosophy, we ask what characteristics are ‘appropriate’ to the deity, then we have to exclude difference, diversity,
movement and suffering from the divine nature,” he writes.31 “The absolute subject of Nominalist and Idealist philosophy is also incapable of suffering; otherwise it would not be absolute,” so we are working with Greek, nominalist and idealist philosophy as the conceptual fund for the traditional doctrine.32
Yet however impassibility (along with simplicity and aseity) might have been formulated in nominalism and idealism, the fact of the matter is that these affirmations were strenuously maintained by the ecumenical church until recently, quite apart from these modern developments. In fact, the demise of this consensus occurred with the advent of absolute idealism. Moltmann argues that the patristic theology clung to impassibility in theory (contrary to its liturgical and devotional praxis) “for two reasons”: to protect the creator-creature distinction, and to hold out salvation as conferring “immortality, non-transience, and hence impassibility too” by participation in his eternal life.33 The ancient formulation knew only the false choice between “essential incapacity for suffering” and “a fateful subjection to suffering.”
But there is a third form of suffering: active suffering – the voluntary laying oneself open to another and allowing oneself to be intimately affected by him; that is to say, the suffering of passionate love. In Christian theology the apathetic axiom only really says that God is not subjected to suffering in the same way as transient, created beings. It is in fact not a real axiom at all. It is a statement of compassion. It does not exclude the deduction that in another respect God certainly can and does suffer. If God were capable of suffering in every respect, then he would also be incapable of love.34
Moltmann approaches here what I am calling the analogical proviso, even allowing that the “apathetic axiom only really says that God is not subjected to suffering in the same way as transient, created beings,” which he is quite willing to accept. “God does not suffer out of deficiency of being, like created beings. To this extent he is ‘apathetic.’ But he suffers from the love which is the superabundance and overflowing of his being. In so far as he is ‘pathetic.’”35
But is Moltmann consistent with this analogical proviso or qualification? He develops his account out of the relationship in which God “makes himself a partner in a covenant with his people.”36
Creation, liberation, covenant, history and redemption spring from the pathos of God. This therefore has nothing to do with the passions of the melody, envious or heroic gods belonging to the mythical world of sagas. Those gods are subject to destiny because of their passions. But the divine passion about which the Old Testament tells us is God’s freedom. It is the free relationships of passionate participation…Of course
the images of Yahweh as Israel’s friend, or father, or mother, or her disappointed lover are just as anthropomorphic as the notions of an ardent, jealous, angry, or erotically craving God. But what these images are trying to express is missed by the person who holds ‘apathy’ to be the only characteristic that is ‘appropriate’ for the deity.37
Appealing to the mystical, kabbalistic and speculative traditions, Moltmann almost treats the incarnate Christ as a cipher for God’s eternal kenotic being: “If Christ is weak and humble on earth, then God is weak and humble in heaven. For ‘the mystery of the cross’ is a mystery which lies at the centre of God’s eternal being”—and not simply at the center of God’s eternal plan.38 Moltmann so identifies revelation (the economy) with God’s being (in himself) that despite his criticisms of Barth for substituting an absolute Subject for the three persons, his own move is strikingly similar. According to Sabellianism (modalism), it is the Father (as the only divine person) who suffers. While Moltmann is not a modalist, the same question could be put to his project: What is it that the Son uniquely brings to the God-world relationship?
The historical passion is not so much the culmination of a divine plan as it is a window through which we see what is in fact an eternal event—this despite Moltmann’s otherwise persuasive and pervasive critique of Parmenides and Plato. “If we follow through the idea that the historical passion of Christ reveals the eternal passion of God, then the self-sacrifice of love is God’s eternal nature.”39 In fact, the Christ event does not seem to be a contingent (and therefore genuinely historical) eschatological intrusion, but is necessary to God’s inner being. It is not simply that God’s mercy, grace, compassion and kindness are eternal attributes: the cross itself, or at the very least, the event (not just the possibility) of suffering and self-sacrifice are predicates of God’s nature. The cross is not something that might not have happened: “Self-sacrifice is God’s very nature and essence.”40
While we cannot explore this point more fully, one wonders if the theodicy represented here can be correlated not only with scripture but with the experience of suffering that Moltmann himself has known quite closely. How can a victim of the Holocaust, for example, concede, “Suffering love overcomes the brutality of evil and redeems the energy in evil, which is good, through the fulfillment which it gives to this misguided passion”?41 Moltmann says that “the process of evolution is the process of redemption through suffering love.”42 This requires us to regard God’s love in the creation and sustenance of the world as “suffering love” rather than unconditional love. And it therefore calls into question, as much as the pagan view Israel opposed, not only the goodness of God but the goodness of creation as creation. What is the source of suffering in creation (and thus in God)? The Son, the Spirit—eventually the other that is the world? Moltmann speculates that “if God is already in eternity and in his very nature love, suffering love and self-sacrifice, then evil must already have come into existence with God himself, not merely with creation, let alone with the Fall of man.”43 Rather than embrace a dualistic cosmology such as Manichaeism, with good and evil grounded in two opposing gods, Moltmann synthesizes these oppositions within the very being of God himself.44 Again we should be aware that in the history of metaphysics dualism and monism often depend on each other for their strength. Thus Moltmann approves G. A. Studdert Kennedy’s conclusion: “God,
the Father God of Love, is everywhere in history, but nowhere is He Almighty.”45 A God who does not suffer does not really live.46 It would seem that the categories provided by nineteenth-century speculative philosophy press Moltmann to choose between the “absolute” and the “personal.” Given the interdependence of God and the world via the history of suffering, “It is not only that we need God’s compassion; God also needs ours…The deliverance of the world from its contradiction is nothing less than God’s deliverance of himself from the contradiction of his world.”47
In recent discussions of impassibility (as other incommunicable attributes), readers are pressed to make a decision between false alternatives. This point comes into sharper focus in open theism’s treatment of the classical doctrine of divine impassibility, which it incorrectly defines as the inability to experience or feel emotion. If God were exactly identical to every representation we come across in scripture, could we not justly conclude that he is, for instance, capricious: “Kiss the Son, lest he become angry and you perish in the way, for his wrath can flare up in an instant” (Ps. 2:12, emphasis added)? As we have seen above, Moltmann seems more aware of the dangers in entirely rejecting the analogical proviso just at this point.48 In this Psalm, God is depicted as mocking his enemies with sardonic laughter. But do we really want to ascribe this univocally to God’s being rather than to recognize it as a sober comparison of a great king undisturbed by the pretenses of human power? We have yet to discover among open theists an argument in favor for God’s rage being understood in the same univocal terms as his repentance.
There is also enough similarity to what we experience as love to say “God is love” (1 Jn. 4:8), but love is obviously different in the case of the one who loves in absolute freedom than for creatures whose experience of love is always related to some form of dependence and reciprocity. This very point seems implied in the same chapter: “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be an atoning sacrifice for our sins…We love him because he first loved us” (1 Jn. 4:10, 19). In other words, here God’s love is the ultimate reality and human loves analogies: human love is a theomorphism.
Surely this dialectic play of analogies is comparable to the narrative representation of God as repenting and yet affirming, “I am not a mortal that I should repent” (1 Sam.15:29). Jealousy is praised in God (Ex. 20:5; 34:14; Dt. 4:24), while it is condemned in creatures (1 Cor. 3:3; Gal. 5:20), so clearly “jealousy” cannot mean exactly the same thing in God and creatures. God is described as uprooting the Israelites “in furious anger and great wrath” (Dt. 29:28), and yet “his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime” (Ps. 30:5). All of these diverse analogies must be taken seriously within their specific redemptive-historical context and then interpreted in the light of the rest of scripture. The anger that God condemns in us (Prov.
29:11, 22; 22:24; 1 Cor. 13:5) is different from the anger that fills him with holy wrath, whatever similarities there may be. Neither Moltmann nor the representatives of openness theology give any significant space to the wide range of divine pathos. Even if we were to adopt their univocal attribution of emotion to God, we would be left with a monopathetic deity whose only pathos is suffering love or, in Pinnock’s expression, creative love. But can this do justice to the scores of passages in which God not only feels our pain but inflicts it? What of God’s hatred, vengeance, jealousy and wrath? Even if they were to make a serious appearance in these proposals, such predications would be quickly absorbed into the higher synthesis. John Sanders, an advocate of open theism, judges,
The desire not to speak about God anthropomorphically simply seems correct. After all, just about everyone takes the biblical references to the ‘eyes,’ ‘arms’ and ‘mouth’ (anthropomorphisms proper) of God as metaphors for divine actions, not assertions that God has literal body parts. But some go further, claiming that the anthropopathisms (in which God is said to have emotions, plans or changes of mind) are not actually to be attributed to God.49
Yet it is precisely the desire to speak anthropomorphically and to recognize it as such that defines an analogical approach. But further, why would we make an arbitrary distinction between analogies of being and analogies of feeling? This is not to reject predications of emotion to God (as classical theism has tended to do), but it is also not to say that emotions are predicated univocally of God and humans. If all predicates applied to God and creatures must be regarded as analogical, that would include references to God’s sardonic laughter at his enemies in Psalm 2 or his grief at the disobedience of covenant partners. Perhaps, to attain consistency, one should speculate with Moltmann that God has tear ducts.50 Pinnock does in fact take this next logical step, speculating concerning God’s embodiment beyond the incarnation.51 This is a good example of how God’s transcendence itself is at stake in these debates, and how the denial of divine simplicity easily leads to a rejection of divine spirituality. But short of making the move to affirm divine corporeality, there seems to be no theoretical reason to separate attributions of particular emotions from attributions of particular limbs and organs.52
We do not have the space here to pursue this important point further.53 Nevertheless, renewed attention to this particular formulation of divine impassibility would seem to be called for on both sides of this debate.
B. B. Warfield’s treatment of divine emotion contrasts sharply with the picture that one obtains from many of the recent caricatures especially of Reformed orthodoxy and also warns us against formulations of the traditional view that begin with philosophical presuppositions of what is appropriate for God rather than attending closely to the biblical narrative. We are told, Warfield says, “that God is, by the very necessity of His nature, incapable of passion, incapable of being moved by inducements from without; that He dwells in holy calm and unchangeable blessedness, untouched by human sufferings or human sorrows forever—haunting
The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud, nor moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
His sacred, everlasting calm.
But Warfield replies,
Let us bless our God that it is not true. God can feel; God does love. We have Scriptural warrant for believing that, like the hero of Zurich, God has reached out loving arms and gathered into His own bosom that forest of spears which otherwise had pierced ours. But is not this gross anthropomorphism? We are careless of names: it is the truth of God. And we decline to yield up the God of the Bible and the God of our hearts to any philosophical abstraction….We may feel awe in the presence of the Absolute, as we feel awe in the presence of the storm or of the earthquake…But we cannot love it; we cannot trust it…Nevertheless, let us rejoice that our God has not left us by searching to find Him out. Let us rejoice that He has plainly revealed Himself to us in His Word as a God who loves us, and who, because He loves us, has sacrificed Himself for us.54
At the same time, Warfield can only testify to these wonderful truths because God freely assumed our humanity without ceasing to be God. The sixth-century Syrian monk we know as Pseudo-Dionysius put it this way: “Marvel at this incomprehensible mystery: the simple became complex, the immutable and impassible became subject to change and suffering like us in all respects but sin—without ceasing to be simple, immutable, and impassible.”
If God were merely absolute—without relation—he could not be the Father who “so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son.” Yet if he were not absolute, he would be part of the problem rather than the savior from it. The key distinction that emerged all the way back in the Cappadocian fathers was that while God is not related to creation, he freely relates his creation to himself. Instead of making God in our image, God makes us in his image. God is not like us; rather, he created us to be like him according to his moral character. Whatever weaknesses that might attend criticisms and counter-proposals, there can be little doubt that some traditional interpretations of God’s otherness have been freighted with assumptions that are alien to the biblical canon.
The Stoic doctrine of apathes / apatheia is flatly denied by the Christian tradition wherever the latter asserts God’s free involvement in the world. Moltmann is right when he says that we cannot read the passion narratives and conclude that God is aloof and unaffected by us. While some ancient and medieval writers evidence a wariness toward attributing emotion to God, in etymological terms at least God’s impassibility referred not to an inability to relate or to feel, but to suffer. For the ancients, “emotions” referred mainly to the temperamental moods of the gods, not to feeling or experience per se. This is one of those cases in which the English cognate does not match the Greek or Latin. We assume that passio is simply passion, but suffering was the precise definition in antiquity.55 This is true even for John of Damascus, whose citations above might make us skeptical. As Gerald Bray points out, “Apatheia, as John of Damascus understood it, meant the inability to suffer, i.e., impassibility in the strict sense. The emphasis was not on tranquility in a state of indifference, but on the sovereignty of God.”56 Moreover, impassible does not mean without affections but rather immunity to being the passive victim of creatures. Immutability does not mean immobility; on the contrary, God is the self-moved mover, ever-living, ever-active, ever-moving all things toward his goodness. However much in this respect the Christian doctrine sounds similar to Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, the differences are greater. Charles Hodge, for example, reminds us that in the classical view God is immutable, “but nevertheless that He is not a stagnant ocean, but an ever living, ever thinking, ever acting, and ever suiting his action to the exigencies of his creatures, and to the accomplishment of his infinitely wise designs” (emphasis added). Far from speculating how this is so, which extreme representations on both sides of this debate are often tempted to do, he adds,
Whether we can harmonize these facts or not, is a matter of minor importance. We are constantly called upon to believe that things are, without being able to tell how they are, or even how they can be. Theologians, in their attempts to state, in philosophical language, the doctrine of the Bible on the unchangeableness of God, are apt to confound immutability with immobility. In denying that God can change, they seem to deny that He can act.57
Immutability must not be confused with immobility, and there is unanimity here among the various Reformed dogmatics.58 In a similar vein, Cornelius Van Til writes,
Surely in the case of Aristotle the immutability of the divine being was due to its emptiness and internal immobility. No greater contrast is thinkable than that between the unmoved noesis noeeseoos of Aristotle and the Christian God. This appears particularly from the fact that the Bible does not hesitate to attribute all manner of activity to God….Herein lies the glory of the Christian doctrine of God, that the unchangeable one is the one in control of the change of the universe (emphasis added).59
Kevin J. Vanhoozer offers a suggestive way forward. He begins by summarizing the traditional account. Although Augustine moved beyond the Platonic view that the gods, lacking nothing, cannot love (referring to God’s love as “gift-love: agape”), he nevertheless held with the Stoics the belief that “pathos—any emotional event that ‘disturbs’ reason and joy—has no place in the life of the only wise God.”
Importantly, Aquinas does not believe that God responds to the good in a thing by loving it, but rather that God’s love for a thing is the cause of its goodness. On the traditional view, then, God metes out good but takes neither joy nor delight in the good he brings about (for this would make God’s joy conditional on something in the world). That in which God takes delight turns out to be his own exercise of benevolence… Similarly, we may experience God’s mercy or his wrath, but it is not God who changes, only our relation to him. ‘What changes is the way we experience the will of God’ (Richard Creel)…This is a most important analytic point: impassibility no more means impassive than immutability means immobile. God may be unmoved (transcendent: unsusceptible to worldly causes), but he is nevertheless a mover (immanent: active and present in the world).60
Furthermore, because God is the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, there is no question of brute force operating on a passive object. The characteristic method of God’s creative, providential and saving operations is speech. The Father’s word goes forth, mediated by the Son, made effectual in creatures by the Spirit. Because this word is not only above us but with us and within us, it is wins our consent and participation.
Even evil and sin are comprehended in God’s eternal decree; therefore, not even these can be said to condition God’s will or acts. Further, Vanhoozer’s construction of this argument is trinitarian: “the Son and Spirit are means of the Father’s communicative action.”61
In the covenant God establishes with creatures, there is real partnership, but always in analogical rather than univocal relations. Recent criticisms of impassibility rarely succeed in challenging the dominant causal paradigm; they simply insist that the causal impact should run in both directions and often have difficulty resisting the temptation to see our acting upon God and God’s causal action upon us in univocal terms. This is not to eliminate the category of cause from theological discourse, but to question its usefulness as an all-encompassing paradigm within which the divine-human relationship should be interpreted. Thus, we will be appealing to this communicative approach at a number of points throughout this volume.
Finally, what are we to make of the attribution of immutability to God? As with impassibility, a lot depends on the definition. According to critics of the doctrine, immutability is equivalent to immobility. In fact, in reducing the classic doctrine of God to Aristotle’s “unmoved mover,” Clark Pinnock simply calls it the “immobility package.”62 Ever since at least Dorner, there has been an attempt to forge a distinction between God’s moral attributes, which cannot change, and God’s being, which is conditioned to some degree by the world. Adherents of this thesis range from more conservative presentations (such as Dorner’s) to more radical versions (such as process theology). But can a covenantal paradigm, underscoring the analogical character of all theological predication, avoid such a dualism between God’s character and being?
What is it then exactly for God to be moved? If we knew the answer to that, would we not have univocal (archetypal) knowledge of God’s being in esse? There is an appropriateness to analogies that must not be given short shrift in order to save God from his own revelation, and yet analogies are not an exact fit between sign and reference. In scripture, the virtue in not being “moved” lies in the assurance that God is trustworthy (Ps. 16:8; 21:7), while for the Greeks it meant that immobility—pure stasis, was a supreme mode of being.
How then might we build a doctrine of God with the timber of “strong verbs” leading to adverbs and nouns? In that narrated identity of God in scripture there emerges a number of direct claims and legitimate inferences that justify at least the conclusion that despite the anthropomorphic analogies that render a real actor in a historical drama, God cannot be overwhelmed by surprise, since his knowledge is perfect and encompasses the past, present and future (Job 37:16; Ps. 139:1-6, 16-18), including the free acts of creatures (Ex 7:1-7, , 14; 8:15, 19; 9:12, 35; 10:1-2; 11:1-3, 9; 1 Sam 23:10-13; Is 42:9; Ac 2:23; Ro 8:28; 9:16; Eph 1:11). Although God can be opposed, ultimately he cannot be overwhelmed by opposition (Dan 4:17- 37; Ex 15:1-23; 8:11; Ps 22:28-31; 47:2-8; 115:3; 135:5-21; Jer 27:5; Ac 17:24-6; Ro 9:17-21; Rev 11:15-19). And although God can be present in a particular place and time, he cannot be overwhelmed by such circumscription (Ps 139:7-12). The focus of the biblical testimony seems to be on the proscription of any limitations on God’s attributes, not of God’s capacity to genuinely relate.
Similarly, while God participates in the joy and sorrow of his people, without which the moral attributes of God would be empty, he is never overwhelmed by distress. Thus, narratives in which God is represented as impatient or enraged reveal the seriousness with which God takes transgression of his covenant, but they provide no univocal description of God’s being in itself. God is never overwhelmed with distress because God is more unlike than like us. And this is treated as welcome news for those for whom God not only has compassion but also reserves anger: “I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath” (Hos 11:9). The same is assured in Malachi 3:6: “’For I am the LORD, I do not change; therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob.’” God’s immutability is surely to be distinguished from any Greek concept of immobility, yet God’s independence from the world is maintained precisely in and with his involvement in it. Only because God does not change, despite constant reprisals from his creation, can there be confidence to face each day without the threat of immanent disaster.
“To whom will you liken me and make me equal, and compare me, as though we were alike?” (Is. 46:5; 55:8-9; Num 23:19; 1 Sam. 15:29; Hos. 11:9). The fact is that God has compared himself to humans, as though we were alike—and yet (the analogical proviso), God retains his transcendence. Although truly known in his revelation, God cannot be contained by it (finitum non capax infiniti). To take analogies seriously is not to take them univocally. Scripture is no less analogical when it says that God does not repent than when it represents him as doing just that. Models are metaphors and rather than being alternatives to “reality depicting” language, they are the very means of indicating reality. This is as true in the natural sciences as in theology.63
Despite his incomprehensibility, God wills to enter into a relationship with his creatures. The covenant is the context in which that becomes possible. God enters into worldly relations, yet without simply collapsing Jesus into God, revelation into the divine essence, the immanent into the economic trinity, the eternal decree (things hidden) into its temporal execution (things revealed). Let us turn for a moment to examples of this covenantal (analogical) discourse, particularly as touching on this debate. Since we have raised the question of immutability as part of the constellation of attributes traditionally predicated of God (and under contemporary criticism), let us interact at this point especially with the claims of what has come to be called “open theism,” especially within recent evangelical discussions. We have already referred to some of their representative writings.
The obvious examples have to do with God relenting and repenting. Both, open theists contend, demonstrate that God is not immutable, independent or omniscient—at least as these terms have been historically understood.64 In 1 Samuel 15:11, for example, God regrets having made Saul king, and yet in verse 29 we read, “Moreover the Glory of Israel will not recant or change his mind; for he is not a mortal, that he should change his mind.” Neither God’s nature or his secret plan changes, and this is why believers can be confident that “if we are faithless, he remains faithful; he cannot deny himself” (2 Tim. 2:13; cf. Mal. 3:6, to the same point). So what changes if not God’s secret plans? It is his revealed plans that change: the judgment that he has warned that he will bring upon the people is averted—precisely as God had predestined before the ages. The dynamic give-and-take so obvious in the history of the covenant must be distinguished from the eternal decree that scripture also declares as hidden in God’s unchanging and inaccessible counsel (Eph. 1:4-11).
These are not two contradictory lines of proof-texts, one line pro-openness; the other pro-classical theism. Rather, there are two lines of analogy acting as guardrails to keep us on the right path. There is real change, dynamic interaction and partnership in this covenant (Deus revalatus pro nos). At the same time, God is not like the human partner in that he does not repent the way the latter repents: God transcends the analogies (Deus absconditus in se) even while revealing himself in and through them. With scripture, we speak on one hand of the fall as contrary to God’s revealed will and yet comprehended in God’s secret plan (Ro 8:20-1). In this view, we need not have the difficulty with the “repentance” passages the way open theists seem, by their silence, to be burdened by the “non-repentance” passages. Against both hyper
Calvinism and openness theology, we need not reduce everything to either the eternal decree of the hidden God or the historical covenant of the revealed God.65
An analogical account provides a paradigm in which both God’s independence from and relatedness to creaturely reality may be seriously affirmed without resolving the mystery in a false dilemma. Although Moltmann is an exception, Jenson, Pinnock and Sanders all reflect an impatience with paradox that goes hand in hand with their impatience with analogy.66 This rationalistic tendency can be seen, ironically, on both sides of the debate, by both defenders and critics of classical theism, where certain predicates are either affirmed or denied in a univocal sense.
Yet, despite calls to trade abstract for concrete description of God, many of the critics of traditional affirmations of God’s independence do end up speaking of transcendence and immanence in quite abstract, static and general terms. Some of their expressions appear to be timeless ideas drawn from the familiar antitheses of ancient and modern dualism (and dualistic monism) and this often leads to false dilemmas. Either we worship a God who does not want to “control everything, but to give the creature room to exist and freedom to love,” or “…an all controlling despot who can tolerate no resistance (Calvin),” giving the false impression that Calvin actually held this position attributed to him.67 Further, we must choose between a God who is “immobile” (a “solitary monad”) and the “Living God” who is dependent on the creation for his happiness.68 That is important, since the very title of Pinnock’s book suggests that the position he is criticizing is little more than a religious gloss on Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover.” But since we have already seen that immobility is in no way required by immutability, we need not repeat those arguments here.
YHWH is therefore not a solitary monad lost in self-contemplation, a Buddha-like figure who closes his eyes to the world in order to contemplate his own bliss. But he is also not a creature contained in and circumscribed by the reality that he has created apart from himself. Douglas Farrow puts it well: “It is an imposition on the biblical narrative, as on dogmatic tradition, to suggest that the God who has decided not to be God without us is therefore only God by being God with us.”69
In contrast to both Parmenidean permutations of divine bliss and Heraclitean versions of divine flux, biblical hope inserts the eschatological category of Shalom. While this is certainly not Stoic immobility and apatheia, it is nevertheless peaceful existence, but the kind of peace defined by God in the analogy of Israel and its theocratic laws and supremely in Christ’s proclamation of the kingdom: the absence of strife, suffering, evil and unrighteousness. It is even named sabbath rest, not because there is no movement but because there is no departure from the proper relation to God; not because there is no passion, but because the passion of God’s own abundant life and joy constantly revitalizes and refreshes its inhabitants. If God indwells the Sabbath (and if he doesn’t, how can he bring us into it?), then he is already enjoying everlasting peace, joy, righteousness in the triune fellowship of perfect giving and receiving, loving and being loved. God not only enjoys this sabbath reality in its fullest measure already, but is working to bring it about for us. In answer to criticism for healing on the Sabbath, Jesus replied, “My Father is still working, and I also am working” (Jn 5:17). Yet this working is also a resting in which the ultimate purposes of the Triune God, though opposed, are never thwarted. It is precisely because God is independent and unconditioned in his Sabbath reign that he is able to bring hope to victims and victimizers and it is precisely because God has freely entered into a covenantal relation with the creatures that we can trust that he is willing to do so.
