I had nearly decided not to comment on John Hobbins’ embrace of theopaschite ways, when I received an email encouraging me to respond. I offer a handful of comments, and invite John and others to reply.
It seems to me there are strong and weak versions of theopaschitism. The weak asserts that God truly suffered in the flesh by drawing on the exchange of predicates: whatever may be said about Christ in his human nature may also truly be asserted about God. (Hence the insistence that Mary is properly called Mother of God.) This weak form is fully compatible with the idea of God’s impassibility, although it can easily seem to the modern mind to be playing language games. John, however, appears to assert a strong version of the doctrine and identify theopaschitism with the passibility of God, fully and completely. It is this latter position I am commenting on here.
Any discussion of questions like this easily sounds as though we are making more certain and clear claims about God than we actually can, and can also come across to others as debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Despite these dangers, I think there is something important here in defending the idea of what we might call the “Godness” of God: his otherness and above all his absolute freedom and lack of external and un-chosen constraints. Impassibility defends the very definition of God, and his power to act in creation and redemption.
The debate is not one, as it is often popularly put, of philosophical ideas versus biblical ideas, or Hebrew versus Greek, or Athens versus Jerusalem. All of these are entirely false antitheses. Perhaps the most “Greek” statement of the New Testament comes in perhaps the most “Jewish” book: that God is “the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” (James 1:17). The question is, rather, when we talk in more abstract concepts, which better maintains the picture of God’s character as found in the Scriptures, passibility or impassibility.
There is no doubt that there is a strong argument to be made from the narrative form and the language for the passibility of God. The Hebrew Bible in particular is full of anthropomorphisms attributing changes of mind and a whole range of feelings to God. Yet it also contains powerful statements of God’s absolute freedom and transcendence, most particularly in Job and verses like this from Second Isaiah: “I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the LORD do all these things.” (Isaiah 45:7). Impassibility takes and builds on this latter kind of statement as the essential revelation, and deals with the mutable metaphors at the level of language and condescension.
To this point I have said nothing about Jesus, nor him crucified. However, this is usually the focus of most modern rejections of impassibility. In a long roll-call of modern theologians who reject the patristic formulations, Moltmann perhaps stands out as the most impassioned: a true theologia crucis demands that we speak of the suffering of the Crucified God. Against this I would suggest that one of the unifying features of the gospels is their portrayal of Jesus as the one in charge: whether he is responding or initiating, he acts freely and of his own volition. This is extended to his death as a destiny he walks towards, often to the bafflement of his disciples. In Luke’s narrative and exemplary model we find Jesus acting in continuation of his ministry of forgiveness and reconciliation throughout his passion. In Matthew’s comes the insistence that he has legions of angels who could avert the passion (Matt 26:53). in John’s theological portrayal we find the statement that “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.” (John 10:18) In all of these Jesus is not made to suffer, but he chooses to suffer. The problem with Moltmann’s theology in this regard is the privilege it gives to the Markan word of dereliction over and above these other testimonies, yet even Mark too shows Jesus freely embracing the way of the cross.
This, it seems to me, is of the essence of why we affirm impassibility. It is nothing to do with “feelings” of suffering, but about the powerlessness of suffering. No-one can do anything to God that God does not choose to let be done. God is, fundamentally THE agent, the one who acts. The mystery of the cross is that God’s free choice and action is to be done to, to be made the recipient of human action and hostility, to be made passive and to suffer. But if this is not a free choice, above all in his divine nature yet also in his human, but is instead a consequence forced upon him by others and their actions, then it loses, I think, its real power. That God is done ill to and suffers is cold comfort, but not gospel. That the impassible God chooses to be the recipient of human ill and suffer actively for the world’s redemption: that is the real good news. Impassibility, far from being a strange idea imposed on the gospel, is what underwrites the cross as gospel, a free act of love, not a necessary consequence of human sin.
