Divine Impassibility - by Kevin DeYoung

Found here. Our comments in bold.

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Pay close attention, dear reader, as you consider the author's presentation. It comes across as thoughtful, superficially scholarly, and biblical. But there's no substance. It empty of explanations, it contains no specifics, and the logic is faulty.

The author quotes a statement of faith and the lyrics to a hymn. Not a single word from the Bible. He explains nothing, edifies no one, and does nothing to add to biblical understanding.

This is truly Bad Bible Teaching.

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As the Westminster Confession of Faith puts it, "God is without body, parts, or passions." Given contemporary objections, why should Christians still affirm divine impassibility?... Kevin DeYoung gives us four reasons why we should still uphold this incommunicable attribute.

Our full explainer video series on the incommunicable attributes of God can be viewed on our Clearly Reformed YouTube channel. Click To Watch Now

Transcript

In simplest terms, divine impassibility means that God does not suffer. (Well, actually, more specifically, it means that God does not experience emotion.)

Or to put it a little more broadly: impassibility means God cannot be acted upon from without, neither can his inner state change for better or worse. As the Westminster Confession of Faith puts it, God is “without body, parts, or passions” (WCF 2.1). (Um, yeah, but what does the Bible say?)

Of all the classic attributes, impassibility is the one most likely to be rejected by contemporary Christians. (Could this be because of its total irrelevance?)

You might be thinking to yourself: Isn’t the God of the Bible full of emotion and feeling? Isn’t impassibility just a holdover from Greek philosophy and the idea of an Unmoved Mover? Or more existentially you might wonder: In a world of pain, who wants a God immune from human suffering anyway? Besides, doesn’t the crucifixion reveal that God—in his very nature—is a suffering God?

Given these objections, why should Christians still affirm divine impassibility? Let me give you four reasons. (They will not be biblical reasons. And none of them will address these questions.)

First, divine impassibility has been taught by the Christian church from the beginning. (An Appeal To History.)

The early church held it as self-evident that God was unchangeable, eternal, and incapable of being acted upon from within or without. This did not mean that they thought of God as static and lifeless. The church fathers believe that the impassible God was also passionate. God is immoveable, but not inert. He does not have emotions like us, but he is not motionless.

From Anselm to Aquinas to Calvin, almost no theologian believed that God suffered. And at the same time, they never thought of God as distant or uncaring.

Second, divine passibility leads to all sorts of problems. If God suffers along with us, then not must God be miserable all the time. (Is this the argument the author's opponents make? This is one of the theological problems that negates passibility? 

And, why would God necessarily miserable all the time?)

And God must be undergoing constant change. (Why? Why would God's "state of mind" necessarily indicate changes in His basic nature?)

This places God on the same ontological level as his creation. (Why? Why would a "passible" God be relegated to a status akin to humans?)

He is no longer being; he is becoming. (Arrrgh. Why? Why? Stop making these unconnected, illogical assertions!)

This in turn leads to errors like process theology whereby God is said to be in process with us, hoping to solve the problem of human suffering so that he himself can be free from his own suffering. That is a helpless God unlike the God of the Bible. (Sigh. A long string of unrelated and undocumented assertions to arrive at a conclusion completely divorced from the matter at hand. 

We are no longer confident of the author's thinking skills.)

Third, God’s emotional life is not identical to ours. (God has an emotional life? Then how can He be impassible??? In this emotional life, is He sad, angry, depressed, or optimistic? How exactly is His emotional like not identical to ours? Where does the Bible tell us these things?)

Everyone recognizes that the Bible often describes God as having various body parts—a strong arm, a long nose, a footstool under his feet. We call these anthropomorphisms, talking about God using the language of human physicality. Well in the same way the Bible is full anthropopathisms, talking about God using the language of human emotions. (Give us a biblical example. Please.)

While we do not want to be afraid to use the language of Scripture, we must not think that God “feels” the way we feel. Emotions sweep over us, but God is not made to feel by forces outside of himself. (Where doe the Bible tell us this?)

God has affections (motions of the will), but philosophically speaking, he does not have passions (experiences that happen to him or render him passive). (How does the author know this? What does it mean that God does not have experiences that happen to Him? What does it mean to be rendered passive?

Will the author explain anything?)

God cannot be affected from without, (Please. Where does the Bible tell us this? If this is true, then why do we pray or worship? Why did He negotiate with Abraham over the city of Sodom? Why did God relent when Moses appealed to God's reputation being damaged if He destroyed the Israelites?)

nor does he will to be changed from within. God is so completely full of action that he cannot change. (What does this nonsense statement mean? Where do we find this concept in the Bible?)

Impassibility does not reject God’s vitality; it safeguards it. (God's vitality is safeguarded by a doctrine? What? We are nearing the end of our tolerance for these endless proclamations and undocumented factoids.)

Fourth, impassibility maintains the full glory and mystery of the incarnation. If God as God can suffer, then there was no need for the Son of God to become, as Hebrews puts is, for a little while lower than the angels so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. (Why? How do these connect? Are you going to explain anything?)

Think of that line from Wesley’s hymn “And Can It Be”: “Tis mystery all, the Immortal dies.” There is nothing remarkable about the mortal dying and nothing amazing about the passible suffering. The wonder of wonders is that in the incarnation, God did the most un-Godlike thing possible: he suffered and died. And the incarnation was necessary for that to happen.

The incarnation is not a revelation of the eternal suffering of God but the deepest expression of God’s love whereby he chose freely to suffer as one of us. (So God loves and God suffered. Hmmm.)

The good news is not that God feels our pain but that on the cross, the God-man felt human pain, and that by his suffering he conquered sin, death, and the devil for every human being that trusts in him. (No, His suffering did not conquer death, His death and resurrection did. 

Re. 1:18 I am the Living One; I was dead, and behold I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and Hades. 

 

1Co. 15:55 “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”

This kind of article can only result from keeping one's Bible closed and dusty. There isn't a single documented statement, no biblical statement, and no statement that edifies or instructs the believer in living a holy life.

What a waste of time.)

Kevin DeYoung is the senior pastor at Christ Covenant Church (PCA) in Matthews, North Carolina and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary.