Jan 31
Is impassibility biblical?
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.
January 31st, 2008 at 7:41 pm
“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.”
Doug, Great insights! Here’s how Stanley Fish puts it (as he deconstructs atheisms allthewhile hiding whether he’s a theist) :
“Proving the existence of God would be possible only if God were an item in his own field; that is, if he were the kind of object that could be brought into view by a very large telescope or an incredibly powerful microscope. God, however – again if there is a God – is not in the world; the world is in him; and therefore there is no perspective, however technologically sophisticated, from which he could be spied. As that which encompasses everything, he cannot be discerned by anything or anyone because there is no possibility of achieving the requisite distance from his presence that discerning him would require.”
Of course, instead of talking about our knowing that suffering is powerlessness, Fish is talking about our knowing that our knowledge is limited.
And still, I really like John’s God: “But generally speaking, it seems as if God chooses to dwell within time and experience us in that dimension, and in the process, create a degree of uncertainty for himself, within certain bounds.”
Now, isn’t this God who Jesus is: 1) not always knowing everything and knowing still that he doesn’t know and 2) not always choosing to have any power whatsoever over his suffering? If we don’t yet rush to the cross, then how about considering him low in that make-shift cradle? Is there a hint of omniscience or impassibility there? (Lingamish’s 7 year old even gets that! see his comment over on John’s post)
January 31st, 2008 at 7:42 pm
(comment ref: Fish: “Think Again”: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/is-religion-man-made/#more-52)
January 31st, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Doug, sorry to do this to you, but it appears that I have tagged you.
January 31st, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Doug, it seems to me that you have saved the doctrine of impassibility by redefining it.
Now maybe I have not fully understood the classical doctrine, but I understand “impassible” in the same way as the American Heritage Dictionary:
According to Wikipedia impassibility is
But this is the doctrine which you deny, and I believe correctly so, when you state that God chooses to suffer, implying that he experiences real pain.
So, apparently because you are reluctant to drop the doctrine of impassibility, you have instead redefined “impassible” as the antonym of “passive” in the sense of “Receiving or subjected to an action without responding or initiating an action in return”. Of course you are right to deny that this is true of God. The problem is that in modern English neither “impassive” nor “impassible” is an antonym of “passive”. So you should rename your version of the doctrine of impassibility as the doctrine of non-passivity.
February 1st, 2008 at 2:43 pm
“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.”
In the circles I ran in years ago in undergraduate school it was common place to hear people say “Jesus didn’t have to die on the cross. He could have called down legions of angels…” I don’t think that’s true.
He could, of course, have chosen not to die. He could have come in judgment. He did choose to die, but He chose it before the creation of the world… and yet, chose to create the world anyway, knowing the consequence of that free act in His divine nature was to also choose the cross as a free act in His human nature.
I don’t know from theopaschitism, and the technical theological aspects of impassibility are beyond my pay grade, but I do know this: At the death of a friend, God wept. There’s more mystery than meaning in that, and all I can do is worship the unchanging God who is moved by love.
February 1st, 2008 at 2:55 pm
[...] discussion I first saw at Ancient Hebrew Poetry and then followed over to MetaCatholic on theopaschitism and the impassibility of God reminded me of something that I [...]
February 1st, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Bo, surely what you are denying is Jesus’ words in Matthew 26:53. OK, this was before he was actually crucified, but a long time after the creation of the world, and he was still saying this in the present tense. He could still choose, right up to the last minute, to avoid the cross, but he did not turn away from his determination to fulfil the divine purpose for him to die.
February 5th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
Before I address Peter’s comment to me I would like to apologize for the double entry. I didn’t realize my own blog posting would track back and be posted here or I wouldn’t have made the original comment.
Peter, I can’t help but read Jesus’ question as rhetorical in light of v. 54.
53 “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?”
54 “But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?”
What you are suggesting is that once standing before the cross Jesus could choose to leave God’s promise and prophecy unfulfilled.
I imagine God’s choices do not flow temporally as we think our own do. I choose A then plan B, C and D as means to achieve A and then set about acting etc. I imagine God’s choices exist fully and completely in all times at once.
Which, I suppose, means the question wasn’t rhetorical at all?
Maybe it would be closer to the truth to say that all God’s choices are present progressive. Jesus might say, if you’ll forgive the presumption, that I am choosing the cross?
February 10th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
[...] I say, and a thousand times “no”! This is exactly why I think the doctrine of impassibility matters. My sin doesn’t have that kind of power. It is God’s free choice, Christ’s free [...]