Interesting article.
Excellent! I think God does suffer. It says He is grieved when we sin.
Hey Michael - did you read that entire article? I would have agreed with you before reading and pondering that issue a lot more.
In any case, thanks for the input!!
I read some of it. But I still believe God suffers. Especially in the person of Christ. I believe when He suffered so did the Father. God’s emotional life is infinitely complex and cannot be grasped by our finite and limited minds. He feels everything at once because He sees all of reality.
You may find that you agree with his conclusions, because he actually shares your - and my - concerns about that as well. He shows, I think, a larger and more comforting picture than we have imagined.
In any case, God is love, and I hang my hat, and the rest of my wardrobe, on that fact. 
Thanks brother.
I agree that God is love. But it’s not the exact same thing as human love. I hang my hat on the scripture that says Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty. What holiness means when applied to God is everything that sets him apart from His creation and His creatures. This is no mere human love. I think when God came as Christ He revealed humble human love to give us an example to follow. But God’s love runs infinitely deeper than human love.
Okay!
Very educational article, Dave. It was a good read.
I wonder if one can take a middle ground between the two positions? Can God be considered both passible and impassible? There seems to be a tension between the two, and I can see the argument of both sides.
If God is exhaustive in knowledge, then He would know better than we what suffering is. An omniscient Being would not have to experience to know. I can see the point of the arguments of the modern theologians as they want to see an intimacy between God and the creature, but can the intimacy be known by the One who knows best without him actually suffering?
Tough question. Too great for my small mind.
Dan.
The question is a biggie, that’s for sure.
This is a classic example of what Tillich is writing about in the systematic theology I’m studying - the poles of ‘message’ and ‘situation’.
The cultural situation has changed, according to the article, from the early patristic centuries; and it is probably important that we understand exactly what they meant during that 1500 years or so of Christian thinking. It’s not like suffering is new, as the essayist points out, and it’s not like the Fathers did not think of God as compassionate. But they were some smart guys and thought that impassibility protected compassion. I think.
I’m re-reading the essay again to get a better grasp. I believe my idea of God is going to have to expand.
A few quotes from the article. I think the article has some explanatory power that clears up some confusion I personally had.
“God is perfectly compassionate not because He suffers with those who suffer, but because His love fully and freely embraces those who suffer. The absence of suffering in God actually liberates God from any self-love that would move Him to act to relieve His own suffering. The absence of suffering allows God’s love to be completely altruistic and beneficent.”
“It is love and not suffering that ultimately is at the heart of compassion, for it is love that brings true healing and comfort.”
“To say that God is the One All Holy Creator and Savior is to express His immanent activity within the created order as the one who is not a member of that created order. This is the great Judeo-Christian mystery, which finds its ultimate expression in the Incarnation: He who is completely other than the created order can be present to and active within the created order without losing His complete otherness in so doing.”
“Even when the Israelites defiled themselves by sin and infidelity, God Himself was not defiled. Rather it is specifically because He is the transcendent Holy One, and so incapable of being defiled, that He could restore them to holiness.”
(Note to self: Is it the same with wholeness, with gladness, with peace, etc? Because He is transcendent, Other, He is incapable of being tossed by circumstance or mood, as thus is always available to us for help in restoration?)
"God could be the mighty Savior only because He transcended all this-worldly and cosmic forces. “To undermine the transcendent otherness of God in order to make God seemingly more immanent undermines the very significance of His immanence. The importance of God’s immanent activity is predicated in direct proportion to His transcendence. It is precisely because God transcends the whole created order of time and history that His immanent actions within time and history acquire singular significance. The one who is in the midst of His people is “The Lord [who] is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary, His understanding is unsearchable” (Isaiah 40:28, see also the whole of chapters 40-45).”
"He does grieve over sin and is angry with His people. However, such emotional states, firstly, are predicated not upon a change in God but upon a change within the others involved…Such reactions or changes predicated of God actually express a deeper truth—that of God’s unchanging and unalterable love and justice as the transcendent other. … The predication of various emotional changes of state within God are not literal statements of His passibility, but illustrate and verify the literal truth that God, being transcendent, far from being fickle as men are, is unalterably, within all variable circumstances, all-loving, all-good, and all-holy.
" I would argue that, for God to be ethically immutable, unchangeably loving and good, demands that He is ontologically immutable—that is, ontologically unchanging in His perfect love and goodness.
"Now, because God is fully actualized in His love and goodness, He cannot be deprived of that love and goodness which would cause Him to suffer, for to suffer such loss would make Him less than perfectly loving and good. Moreover—and here we touch the heart of the issue—it must be remembered, in accordance with the biblical notion of God, that while God is intimately related to creation as its Creator, He exists in His own distinct ontological order as the Creator. Therefore, the sin and evil that deprive human beings of some good and so cause them to suffer is contained wholly within the created ontological order and cannot reverberate or wash back into the uncreated order where God alone exists as absolutely good. If the sin and evil of the created order caused God to suffer, it would demand that God and all else would exist in the same ontological order, for only if He existed in the same ontological order in which the evil was enacted could He then suffer.
" Equally, since evil, which causes suffering, is the privation of some good, it would mean that a suffering God was deprived of some good and thus He would no longer be perfectly good. Moreover, if God, having lost His singular transcendence, is now infected by evil and suffering, then He too is immanently enmeshed in an evil cosmic process from which He, like all else, cannot escape… Thus, a suffering God is not only philosophically and theologically untenable, but also religiously devastating.
Hi Dave, I tried to PM you, but that function was disabled. Regarding the question…, it is true.
Origen
There are many of these types of quotes.
Steve
I’m sorry - I just checked my user setting and I had that turned off. It’s all right now, anyone can PM me.
Thanks for the info.
1 Corinthians 13 tells us that love is patient. The literal here mean love suffers long. The phrase in verse 5 is also rendered, “Love is not easily angered” (NIV), or, “Love is not irritable” (RSV). So you can see that these two descriptions of love are different sides of the same coin: “not easily provoked, irritated, or angered” is the flip side of “suffers long and is patient.” It was by the joy that was set before Him that Christ endured the cross. The joy of cleansing His bride and being exalted at the right hand of the Father. It was this love and joy that sustained Him through His sufferings. When the Bible says: “Love does not seek its own.” I don’t think this means that it is wrong to want to be happy. Because in verse 3 Paul argues that if you don’t love, it profits you nothing. So it’s not wrong to want the right kind of profit. What he’s saying is that love does not seek its own personal, private preference without reference to what may be good for other people. Love seeks its joy in the good of others, not just in private gratification. Selfishness seeks it’s own private pleasure at the expense of others. Love seeks it’s joy in the joy of the beloved.
Good thoughts!
"Contemporary theologians wrongly hold that the attribute of impassibility is ascribing something positive of God, that is, that He is static, lifeless and inert, and so completely devoid of passion. This the Fathers never countenanced. The Fathers were merely denying of God those passions that would imperil or impair those biblical attributes that were constitutive of His divine being. They wished to preserve the wholly otherness of God, as found in Scripture, and equally, also in accordance with Scripture, to profess and enrich, in keeping with His complete otherness, an understanding of His passionate love and perfect goodness. "
“Negatively, God is immutable in the sense that He does not change as do creatures, but He does not change for positive reasons as well. God’s immutability radically affirms and profoundly intensifies the absolute perfection and utter goodness of God, who, as Creator, is the one who truly lives and exists. Because God’s love is unchangeably perfect and so cannot diminish, He is then the eternally living God who is unreservedly dynamic in His goodness, love, and perfection. Similarly, while the divine attribute of impassibility primarily tells us what God is not, it does so for entirely positive reasons. God is impassible in that He does not undergo successive and fluctuating emotional states, nor can the created order alter Him in such a way so as to cause Him to suffer any modification or loss. Nor is God the possessor of negative and sinful passions as are human beings, with their susceptibility to fear, anxiety, dread, greed, lust, or unjust anger. For the Fathers, to deny that God is passible is to deny of Him all such passions that would debilitate or cripple Him as God. Almost all the early Fathers attributed impassibility to God in order to safeguard and enhance His utterly passionate love and all-consuming goodness, that is, the divine fervor and zealous resolve with which He pursues the well-being of His cherished people.”
I like that one
Good quotes Dave. I have a list of the “impassible” quotes in a very comprehensive list of topics of the Early Church Fathers. It is always good to find subjects like this that the fathers are all in agreement on.
Steve.
I still believe God’s emotional life is so infinitely complex that the finite human mind cannot grasp it. Take the sufferings of Christ for example. God wasn’t pleased in the evil done to the innocent Christ and His sufferings in and of itself. What He was pleased in was the obedience of Christ and what He was accomplishing in His sufferings and death and in showing love for sinners. In one sense God was grieved in another sense He was pleased. It’s kind of like having mixed emotions. I fail to see how this undermines God’s love.
Michael - I’m with you, that God’s love is not undermined by anything - it is always the same. I think that ‘impassable’ is the right word for that - His love is not affected by any changes in what mankind does, it is never lessened, sadness never clouds it or hinders it or diverts it.
Well, I guess God could have felt this way from eternity. It says Christ was slain before the foundation of the world. The way I see it, God sees all of reality and therefore experiences everything at once.