A friend and sometimes-classmate of mine, Eli Randolph, has kindly written the post for this week. I hope you enjoy his defense of an oft-forgotten teaching:
“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”
James 1:17
On its face, the doctrine of divine impassibility seems useless to everyday Christians—it does not occur in Scripture, it is not something we hear from the pulpit, and it is not like the doctrine of the Trinity or of the incarnation, for which most Christians have at least some frame of reference. Further, when we do hear certain definitions of the term, it can be confusing, shocking or even opposed to our faith.
Properly defining the term is important for many reasons; for one, there are a lot of definitions for the term. Richard Creel identifies 8 different ways in which “impassibility” is used in Christian theology, and he admits that there may be more in use beyond those eight. So, it is important to understand exactly what is being discussed before we attempt to criticize or build upon the doctrine. I will ask for some grace from the reader here—the conversation around impassibility is very wide-ranging and it is impossible to answer every objection or question in a blog post. I don’t anticipate I can leave you without any questions by the end of this post, so instead of trying to answer every possible objection, my more modest goal is to explain the doctrine and give some sense of why it is important. So here, I will be defining impassibility as God’s being beyond suffering and unable to be coerced by anything outside of God.
The doctrine of impassibility has something of a strange history. From its introduction into Christian theology in the early church until the 19th century, it was almost universally accepted. While the Christian understanding of the doctrine developed over time, impassibility was a constant in Christian theology. During the bitter disputes in the early church which were settled at the early councils, impassibility was accepted by all sides. Additionally, it was maintained in the medieval church and by the Reformers. For those from the Churches of Christ, even Barton W. Stone and Alexander Campbell, the founders of the American Restoration Movement, affirmed divine impassibility. A big influence on the rejection of the doctrine came with the work of the German church historian Adolf von Harnack, who was among the first to accuse the early church of being “corrupted” by Greek philosophy in the first 200-or-so years after Christ and adopting terms and ideas (including impassibility) which were completely foreign and opposed to the doctrines of the early Jesus-followers. This idea caught on quickly in the academy and the church and led to a massive shift in the way people thought of God. Although Harnack’s idea has been widely discounted in recent years thanks to the work of scholars such as Paul Gavrilyuk (I recommend his book The Suffering of the Impassible God for anyone interested in the historical side of this topic), Thomas Weinandy, and David Bentley Hart, belief in a suffering God is still widely held, and many would argue that suffering is necessary for love, so an impassible God cannot love creation.
The doctrine of divine impassibility is not in place to deny that there is something like an emotional state in God, as some of its critics have suggested. Instead, it asserts that God exists in an eternal state of love and joy which nothing can disturb. God possesses all goodness; God is goodness itself, and because of this there is no anxiety or suffering within him. God exists in a perpetual state of love and joy which is shared between the three persons of the Trinity. Rather than demanding God abandon this joy to suffer humanity, we should instead desire to be drawn up into this loving relation, in the divine life which is offered through the saving work of Christ. While we humans undergo change when we are moved to love and joy, God is unchanging. This does not mean God is static, frozen in some way. Rather, God is entirely and constantly what he is. He is perfectly loving, gracious, and holy, so any change in those respects would include a movement away from perfection.
One significant issue with the idea of a God who requires suffering to bring about his goals—or to perfect his love to us or to fully become who he is—is the issue of evil in relation to God. For one, if God’s love requires suffering to be love, then the love from which God created the world is not a perfect love. Further, how can we assert that “God is love” (1 John 4:7, 16) if at one point God’s love was not perfect? The Christian tradition has long taught that God is goodness, and evil is not a “thing.” This does not mean that evil doesn’t exist, but it means that evil is a privation, or absence. Just as darkness is the absence of light, evil is the absence of good. This is how evil can exist in a world which was created by a perfectly good God: evil is not a created thing. Evil can be understood as nonexistence—the opposite of God, who is existence itself. A move towards God is a move towards goodness, the fullness of being. A move away from God is a move towards nothing, towards nonexistence. If, however, suffering and evil are necessary for God to become fully who he is or for his love to be made perfect, they become eternally a part of God. If that is the case, evil is a necessary part of God’s creation and is required for God to become something he is not. Instead of answering the problem of evil, a God who requires suffering is the very reason for evil at all.
Impassibility protects us from this. God does not need us to perfect his love—or to perfect any aspect of his being at all. God is perfectly self-sufficient, not bound by anything. This means creation and the love God has for humanity are not done in order to make himself perfect or embark on some journey to self-discovery, but from a free outpouring of love. God did not need us, but still created and loved that creation. Now, as creation has moved away from God’s goodness and allowed evil to encroach upon it, God remains firm and is able to rescue us from our sufferings. As Ron Highfield has put it, “because God’s hands are not busy wiping away his own tears, they are free to wipe away ours.”