Does God Have Emotions?

The classical doctrine of God has fallen on hard times in some evangelical circles. In this article, I’m specifically thinking of the doctrine of impassibility.¹ The Westminster Confession of Faith says God is without “passions.”² Robert Reymond explains that doesn’t mean God is an immobile stone; he surely empathizes with human grief and suffering. But, Reymond cautions, the WCF does mean that humans can’t cause God any pain, anguish “or any sort of distress upon him against his will.”³

This is the classical position. Augustus Strong believed texts that suggest divine passibility were anthropomorphisms.⁴ So did Calvin.⁵ Berkhof noted that God’s “volitions remain forever the same,” which suggest He cannot be swayed or moved.⁶ A more recent theologian, Rolland McCune, observed that “any view which implies God does in fact suffer and is emotionally involved with creatures or that He undergoes constitutional/emotional change by these outside, created influences would contradict God’s immutability.”⁷

However, the more popular evangelical systematic theology texts in recent memory do not accept the classical position. Millard Erickson noted, “Almost none of the several evangelical systematic theology textbooks published in the past quarter-century endorses the traditional view of God as impassible, or even uses that term.”⁸ Wayne Grudem wrote that impassibility “clearly conflicts with much of the rest of Scripture.”⁹

With this all-to-brief sketch in place, I’ll provide some intriguing thoughts from Jurgen Moltmann’s book Trinity and the Kingdom.¹⁰ The concept of a triune suffering in the Godhead is central to his doctrine of the Trinity.

If, in the manner of Greek philosophy, we ask what characteristics are `appropriate’ to the deity, then we have to exclude difference, diversity, movement and suffering from the divine nature.’ The divine substance is incapable of suffering; otherwise it would not be divine.’ The absolute subject of nominalist and Idealist philosophy is also incapable of suffering; otherwise it would not be absolute. Impassible, immovable, united and self-sufficient, the deity confronts a moved, suffering and divided world that is never sufficient for itself. For the divine substance is the founder and sustainer of this world of transient phenomena; it abides eternally, and so cannot be subjected to this world’s destiny.’

But if we turn instead to the theological proclamation of the Christian tradition, we find at its very centre the history of Christ’s passion. The gospel tells us about the sufferings and death of Christ. The delivering up of God’s Son for the reconciliation of the world is communicated to us in the eucharist in the form of bread and wine. When the passion of Christ becomes present to us through word and sacrament, faith is wakened in us - the Christian faith in God.

The person who believes owes his freedom to Christ’s representation. He believes in God for Christ’s sake. God himself is involved in the history of Christ’s passion. If this were not so, no redeeming activity could radiate from Christ’s death. But how is God himself involved in the history of his passion? How can Christian faith understand Christ’s passion as being the revelation of God, if the deity cannot suffer? Does God simply allow Christ to suffer for us? Or does God himself suffer in Christ on our behalf?

Christian theology acquired Greek philosophy’s ways of thinking in the Hellenistic world; and since that time most theologians have simultaneously maintained the passion of Christ, God’s Son, and the deity’s essential incapacity for suffering - even though it was at the price of having to talk paradoxically about `the sufferings of the God who cannot suffer’.’ But in doing this they have simply added together Greek philosophy’s `apathy’ axiom and the central statements of the gospel. The contradiction remains - and remains unsatisfactory.

Right down to the present day the `apathy’ axiom has left a deeper impress on the basic concept of the doctrine of God than has the history of Christ’s passion. Incapacity for suffering apparently counts as being the irrelinquishable attribute of divine perfection and blessedness. But does this not mean that down to the present-day Christian theology has failed to develop a consistent Christian concept of God? And that instead - for reasons which still have to be investigated - it has rather adopted the metaphysical tradition of Greek philosophy, which it understood as `natural theology’ and saw as its own foundation.

The ability to identify God with Christ’s passion becomes feeble in proportion to the weight that is given to the `apathetic’ axiom in the doctrine of God. If God is incapable of suffering, then - if we are to be consistent - Christ’s passion can only be viewed as a human tragedy. For the person who can only see Christ’s passion as the suffering of the good man from Nazareth, God is inevitably bound to become the cold, silent and unloved heavenly power. But that would be the end of the Christian faith.

This means that Christian theology is essentially compelled to perceive God himself in the passion of Christ, and to discover the passion of Christ in God. Numerous attempts have been made to mediate between apathy and passion in a christological sense, in order to preserve the apathetic axiom; but - if we are to understand the suffering of Christ as the suffering of the passionate God - it would seem more consistent if we ceased to make the axiom of God’s apathy our starting point, and started instead from the axiom of God’s passion. The word `passion’, in the double sense in which we use it, is well suited to express the central truth of Christian faith. Christian faith lives from the suffering of a great passion and is itself the passion for life which is prepared for suffering.

Why did the theology of the patristic period cling to the apathy axiom, although Christian devotion adored the crucified Christ as God, and the Christian proclamation was quite capable of talking about `God’s suffering’? There were two reasons:

1. It was his essential incapacity for suffering that distinguished God from man and other non-divine beings, all of whom are alike subjected to suffering, as well as to transience and death.
2. If God gives man salvation by giving him a share in his eternal life, then this salvation also confers immortality, non-transience, and hence impassibility too.

Apathy is therefore the essence of the divine nature and the purest manifestation of human salvation in fellowship with God.

The logical limitation of this line of argument is that it only perceives a single alternative: either essential incapacity for suffering, or a fateful subjection to suffering. But there is a third form of suffering: active suffering - the voluntary laying oneself open to another and allowing oneself to be intimately affected by him; that is to say, the suffering of passionate love.

In Christian theology the apathetic axiom only really says that God is not subjected to suffering in the same way as transient, created beings. It is in fact not a real axiom at all. It is a statement of comparison. It does not exclude the deduction that in another respect God certainly can and does suffer. If God were incapable of suffering in every respect, then he would also be incapable of love. He would at most be capable of loving himself, but not of loving another as himself, as Aristotle puts it. But if he is capable of loving something else, then he lays himself open to the suffering which love for another brings him; and yet, by virtue of his love, he remains master of the pain that love causes him to suffer. God does not suffer out of deficiency of being, like created beings. To this extent he is `apathetic’. But he suffers from the love which is the superabundance and overflowing of his being. In so far he is `pathetic’.

In the patristic period Origen seems to have been the only one to recognize and employ this distinction.’ Of all the Greek and Latin Fathers he is the only one who dares to talk theologically about `God’s suffering’ …

When Origen talks about God’s suffering, he means the suffering of love, the compassion which is at the heart of mercy and pity. The merciful, the pitiful person participates in the suffering of another, he takes the other’s sufferings on himself, he suffers for others. For Origen this suffering is divine suffering. It is the suffering of God, who bears the world by bearing its burdens. It is the suffering of the Father who in giving up his `own Son’ (Rom. 8.32) suffers the pain of redemption. It is the suffering of God’s Son, who takes our sins and sicknesses upon himself. Origen, that is to say, talks about a divine passion which Christ suffers for us, and at the same time points to a divine passion between the Father and the Son in the Trinity. The suffering of love does not only affect the redeeming acts of God outwards; it also affects the trinitarian fellowship in God himself. In this way the extra-trinitarian suffering and the inner-trinitarian suffering correspond. For the divine suffering of love outwards is grounded on the pain of love within. It is significant that Origen has to talk about God in trinitarian terms at the moment when his text makes him begin to talk about God’s suffering. For we can only talk about God’s suffering in trinitarian terms. In monotheism it is impossible. Both Aristotelian philosophy and the religion of Islam make this clear.