Talk:Impassibility

Useful links

• Puritan Board › God Without Passions
• Puritan Board › Figurative Descriptions of God
• Reformed Answers › God’s Impassibility and Feelings

Notable quotes

Rob Lister:

. . . the most representative statements of the classical tradition do not, in fact, assert God’s indifference to and aloofness from creation, nor do they claim that God was devoid of vibrant affection. Rather, in the main, the classical tradition simply sought to preserve the notion that, as the self-determined sovereign, God is not subject to emotional affects that are involuntarily or unexpectedly wrung from him by his creatures. As we will see further on, this dimension of God’s self-determination was nearly always held in tandem with an affirmation of God’s meaningful emotional experience by the major proponents of the classical impassibility model.^[1]

D.A. Carson:

We might provocatively ask: If God is utterly sovereign, and if he is utterly all-knowing, what space is left for emotions as we think of them? The divine oracles that picture God in pain or joy or love surely seem a little out of place, do they not, when this God knows the end from the beginning, cannot be surprised, and remains in charge of the whole thing anyway?

From such a perspective, is it not obvious that the doctrine of the love of God is difficult?

It is no answer to espouse a form of impassibility that denies that God has an emotional life and that insists that all of the biblical evidence to the contrary is nothing more than anthropopathism. The price is too heavy. . . .

Yet before we utterly write off the impassibility of God, we must gratefully recognize what that doctrine is seeking to preserve. It is trying to ward off the kind of sentimentalizing views of the love of God and of other emotions (“passions”) in God that ultimately make him a souped-up human being but no more. For instance, a God who is terribly vulnerable to the pain caused by our rebellion is scarcely a God who is in control or a God who is so perfect he does not, strictly speaking, need us. The modern therapeutic God may be superficially attractive because he appeals to our emotions, but the cost will soon be high. Implicitly we start thinking of a finite God. God himself is gradually diminished and reduced from what he actually is. And that is idolatry.

Closer to the mark is the recognition that all of God’s emotions, including his love in all its aspects, cannot be divorced from God’s knowledge, God’s power, God’s will. If God loves, it is because he chooses to love; if he suffers, it is because he chooses to suffer. God is impassible in the sense that he sustains no “passion,” no emotion, that makes him vulnerable from the outside, over which he has no control, or which he has not foreseen. . . .

This approach to these matters accounts well for certain biblical truths of immense practical importance. God does not “fall in love” with the elect; he does not “fall in love” with us; he sets his affection on us. He does not predestine us out of some stern whimsy; rather, in love he predestines us to be adopted as his sons (Eph. 1:4–5). The texts themselves tie the love of God to other perfections in God.^[2]

J.I. Packer:

God has no passions. This does not mean that he is unfeeling (impassive) or that there is nothing in him that corresponds to emotions and affections in us, but that whereas human passions—especially the painful ones, fear, grief, regret, despair—are in a sense passive and involuntary, being called forth and constrained by circumstances not under our control, the corresponding attitudes in God have the nature of deliberate, voluntary choices, and therefore are not of the same order as human passions at all.^[3]

1. Lister, Rob. God Is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion (Kindle Locations 551–557). Crossway. Kindle Edition. #
2. Carson, D. A. The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Kindle Locations 508–542). Kindle Edition. #
3. Packer, J. I. Knowing God (p. 136). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition. #