15 February 2013

God is Impassible and Impassioned


What we believe about God--not only elementary questions about ontology--but our deeply held theological beliefs about the way he manifests himself, relates to us and the rest of creation, relates to the other members of the Trinity, are vastly important for determining how we will navigate the complexities of this world. What we believe about God defines how we will react when life is hard, when we read the news, when the next big disaster--either manmade or natural--strikes. We cannot be too careful or too thoughtful about what doctrines we claim on this count.

There was a guy a few years older than me on my small group in Texas who had suffered a traumatic accident when he was a child that had impaired both motor and psychological functions. He was still able to hold a job and even graduated college, but there is no doubt that this accident shaped his life, and continued to do so down to the time I met him, when the accident would have occurred some 20 years in the past. He was one of few people I have ever been around who just did not like me at all. While he was attending our small group we read through John Piper's book Desiring God. Piper, committed Calvinist that he is, has a chapter early in the book where he talks about the sovereignty of God and how it extends to every part of our lives and the events of this world. I happen also to subscribe to this doctrine, finding it biblically necessary as well as deeply comforting. To this young man, though, this doctrine was abhorrent. If God was in control, why would he have allowed this terrible accident to happen when to this man he was just a kid? I challenged him by asking how he found comfort in a God who was out of control of the events of this world but felt sorry for us when bad things happened? If that's all God is good for, then why bother? He walked out of the room, never to return. 

I don't like this story, but what it did teach me is how inclined we are to believe what we want to believe about God and how dangerous and limiting that position can be, based as it generally is on our limited experience in this world as well as our own experience of emotions. This background, along with many other similar stories, has made me very grateful for the opportunity to read Rob Lister's recent book God is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion. Lister, a professor of theology at the Southern Baptist's flagship institution, takes aim at the rather recent and widespread movement broadly called Open Theism, which essentially puts forth that God is changeable, adaptable, and deeply emotional (passible). While most adherents of this belief would not be so bold as to state their beliefs that baldly, it seems to have taken root at the popular level that God feels our pain literally, that prayer changes his mind, and that he is not completely sovereign over his creation. On this last point, I was having a conversation with a Pentecostal friend in Tulsa last summer and when I told him that I believed God to be sovereign over everything in this world, good and bad, you would have thought by the look on his face that I just kicked a puppy. We are charitable enough to God, it seems, that we want to leave him off of the hook for the bad stuff that happens in this world.

Lister hones in on the question of divine emotion in this book, taking aim at the two poles in the conversation: on the one hand, those staunchly impassible (inability for God to be moved at all) who deny any emotional involvement between God and creation, and on the other hand those for whom God is deeply impassioned, an emotional rollercoaster on par with, well, us.

The first half of the book is an historical exploration of the Church Fathers, the Medievalists, and the Reformers who, Lister contends, held the doctrine of divine impassibility while allowing for God to be moved by passions. Many of the Open Theists, including their grandfather Jurgen Moltmann, argue that the Church Fathers were unduly influenced by the Greek metaphysics of Aristotle, positing a removed and unfeeling deity, and therefore refashioned the emotional God of the Bible into a Greco-Christian hybrid, ignoring the many scriptures pointing to God's emotion. Lister rebuffs these claims, maintaining that the Fathers were obedient to the Bible above all else, and asserting that the Open Theists, presumably free from murky philosophy of their own, are merely beholden to a newer philosophy of deity, one that makes God very much like us. 

This survey I found to be the most worthwhile part of the book and recommend the book for the mere chance for one to read the words of such a diverse group of early believers. I hope I never lose the thrill of reading Augustine or Aquinas or Calvin. If I could offer one critique of the book, it would be that the original chapters in the latter portion, particularly chapter nine, are merely derivative of what has come before. Lister at times even requotes material already handled in the earlier portions of the book. This critique is minor because Lister seems aware of this himself. While laying out the thesis for the work, he holds that he is not creating something new so much as subtly redeveloping or reemphasizing an ancient doctrine.

Lister's essential charge against the Open Theists, and others who emphasize God's emotion to the diminishment of his sovereignty, is that they mistake divine emotion as being of the same substance as human emotion. For example, these thinkers have a tendency to sort of glibly assume that when the Bible says God is angry we are to interpret this within the framework of our own experience of emotions. This tendency is not limited to the negative emotions. When told that God is love--a quality that is not entirely emotional at all--we moderns assume that God would define love roughly how we do. This is a grave error: to anthropomorphize God until he resembles us, to make God in our image and in our likeness.

The reality of divine emotion, and Lister is firm in the fact that God does experience emotion, is that it is far different than what we experience. When we are aroused to an extreme emotion we often lose control. I don't need to provide examples of this, it being self-evident and as close to universal as people get. It is ludicrous to think that God experiences emotion in the same way. Lister's main contention here, and one I happen to agree with, is that when God is moved to emotion it is only because he allows himself to be: no external stimulus forces God into an emotional display.

An interesting question, and one that popped into my mind as I read the prefatory chapters, was, what about Jesus? He suffered. Experience emotion and hunger and thirst and tiredness. And, he was God. The concluding chapter is about the incarnation and it answers these questions beautifully. Lister proposes that the reason God had to become man is because God could experience no lack if he remained always in his triune glory. In other words, God could not suffer as God, but had to become man to suffer. The Apostle Peter hints toward this in his first epistle: “Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin” (4:1). Earlier in Peter’s letter he writes that Christ bore our sins “in his body on the tree” (2:24). Peter teaches us, then, that the divine nature didn’t suffer at the crucifixion, but the fleshly body of the God-man Jesus Christ. This distinction between the divine nature and Christ’s body in no way discredits the work of the cross. As Lister argues, the work of Christ on the cross is enhanced when we have a proper view of the suffering of Christ on the tree. He quotes Catholic theologian Thomas Weinandy on this score: 

Even if one did allow the Son of God to suffer in his divine nature, this would negate the very thing one wanted to preserve and cultivate. For if the Son of God experienced suffering in his divine nature, he would no longer be experiencing human suffering in an authentic and genuine human manner, but instead he would be experiencing "human suffering" in a divine manner which would be neither genuinely nor authentically human. . . Thus to replace the phrase "the Impassible suffers" with the "Passible suffers" immediately purges the suffering of all incarnational significance.

In other words, in trying to show that the divine nature suffered on the cross, we actually dilute the power of the human suffering of Christ. The miracle of the incarnation, of the reality of God-become-man, is that Christ emptied himself of his rights to divinity and experienced things as a man that he could never experience as God. That is how he could atone for our sins: it was not the divine nature that was crucified at Calvary, but the human nature in all of its depravity.

I could write much, much more about this book, but will relent there if anyone has even read this far. This book has encouraged me and enlivened me to think about what I think about God and to be careful about this thought process. How thankful I am that God is not like me, yet has chosen out of his great mercy and grace to be passionately for me in all things. He has shown us, through Christ, a standard for experiencing emotion and clinging to the unchanging truths of God. 

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