“Nothing is more dangerous…than to build one’s own road to God and to climb up by our speculations.” (Martin Luther)The biblical Doctrine of Divine Impassibility (DDI) is, I would argue, this:
God is a god who has love for us (John 3:16). Without compromising his immutability (Mal. 3:6) (properly understood, i.e. in relation to His transcendence 1) God’s disposition toward us changes in our walk through linear time. In whatever it means for God for to be pleased or to be angry, it certainly means two different things, and at times God regards us with one and at other times he looks at us with the other. 2 And yet God is in total control of his own passions, and whatever we see as a change in disposition toward us is initiated from within God, from eternity or outside of time, and is not a reaction to something external.
Everything else is a mystery, and should be left that way. We have only the bible and creation to learn of God’s attributes. Everything else is speculation and we should take Luther’s warning, quoted above, seriously. And, throughout Christian history, the worst of the worst speculation (because it sounds so convincingly smart and scholarly, and is often erroneously used to "prove" doctrine) has come from applying Greek philosophy to theology. It is a man-centered, man-elevating, (and, as a consequence, God diminishing) non-rigorous, unfalsifiable method of apologetics that has at its heart the Tower-of-Babel attitude that there are no lasting mysteries with God, just some missing pieces that the Holy Spirit left as an exercise for the really smart readers.
Charles Hodge went after the theologians (and they are legion) who allowed secular philosophy to trump scripture, distorting true doctrines. Hodge wrote:
Love in us includes complacency and delight in its object, with the desire of possession and communion. The schoolmen, and often the philosophical theologians, tell us that there is no feeling in God. This, they say, would imply passivity, or susceptibility of impression from without, which it is assumed is incompatible with the nature of God. "We must exclude," says Bruch, "passivity from the idea of love, as it exists in God. For God cannot be the subject of passivity in any form. Besides, if God experienced complacency in intelligent beings, He would be dependent on them; which is inconsistent with his nature as an Absolute Being." Love, therefore, [Bruch] defines as that attribute of God which secures the development of the rational universe; or, as Schleiermacher expresses it, "It is that attribute in virtue of which God communicates Himself." According to the philosophers, the Infinite develops itself in the finite; this fact, in theological language, is due to love. The only point of analogy between love in us and love in the Absolute and Infinite, is self-communication. Love in us leads to self-revelation and communion; in point of fact the Infinite is revealed and developed in the universe, and specially in humanity. Bruch admits that this doctrine is in real contradiction to the representations of God in the Old Testament, and in apparent contradiction to those of the New Testament. 3 If love in God is only a name for that which accounts for the rational universe; if God is love, simply because He develops himself in thinking and conscious beings, then the word has for us no definite meaning; it reveals to us nothing concerning the real nature of God. (Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume 1)(Emphasis added.) In this quote you see one of the methods (perhaps their favorite) used by the philosopher-theologians: the unsubstantiated assertion. Simply blurt it out, whatever claim you wish to make, without proof (not that there could be any.) In this case it is Bruch telling us that God cannot love in any manner similar to (as he admits later) he is actually portrayed as loving in the bible, because it would be "inconsistent with his Absolute Being." Philosopher theologians claim to know a great deal about God's Absolute Being, and what is, by their reckoning, consistent and inconsistent with it.
For a modern example, and if you would like to read a truly disgraceful, bloviated discussion of the Doctrine of Divine Impassibility (and who wouldn't?), take a look at this masterpiece from the theologians at the Association of Reformed Baptist Churches in America (ARBCA.)
The motto of the theologians of ARBCA would appear to be: Never say anything clearly and concisely, like the WCF or the 2LCF is so good at doing, when we can say it in thousands of words and obfuscating academic jargon instead. And never settle for God sounding like the God of scripture, when we can make him sound more like (or rather, exactly like) Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover.
The ARBCA position paper is not only awful in its own right, it was shamefully used as a litmus test. Back in the heady days when ARBCA was going strong and their future looked bright, long before they were outed in regards to their “the law is for the little people, not us” harboring of a child-abusing wolf among the sheep, (for that, see this report and the links it contains) ARBCA demanded that churches affirm their biblically unsupportable version of Impassibility. So what if they lost a few (in their perspective) low-brow, unschooled, virtually apostate churches over their demand? Good riddance. Plenty of others, the best and brightest, were ready to drink the pseudo-intellectual ARBCA Kool-Aid. No, nothing was going to stop ARBCA, this 21st century juggernaut of inerrant theology, ecclesiology, and polity. The egos of ARBCA were Brobdingnagian, while the humility was correspondingly Lilliputian.
Let us take a look at their DDI paper. On page two, the ARBCA theologians write:
This doctrine is important because it is the teaching of Holy Scripture and is affirmed by our Confession.This is false on both accounts. The first error is a naked assertion that the ARBCA DDI is biblical. But no, scripture does not affirm the ARBCA doctrine of DDI, or rather if it does ARBCA has not successfully teased it out. Nor does the 2LCF align with ARBCA's DDI. The confession, for example, states:
The Lord our God is but one only living and true God; whose subsistence is in and of himself, infinite in being and perfection; whose essence cannot be comprehended by any but himself; a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions. (2LBF 2.1)What the confession states in 43 words is not what ARBCA expresses in, according to my count, 18,357 words. What is being denied by some (myself included) is not the confession's statement but the conclusions that the ARBCA theologians reach, by the application of unsound and unsatisfying philosophical assertions, that speculatively explode the confession's statement on impassibility, which as it stands is (properly) at the limit of what we can ascertain from scripture, into something utterly unrecognizable. And worse they do not treat their version of DDI honestly as a theological possibility of academic interest, which would have some possible value, but rather they regard their position as a cardinal doctrine.
False Dichotomy
One recurring fallacious ARBCA technique that is used is the false dichotomy. For example, they compare
And the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. (Gen 6:6)With
God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it? (Num 23:19)Here they give an unsatisfying red-herring assertion that since the latter speaks of God “ontologically” it trumps the former. Scripture does not give us that hermeneutic; it is an invention of philosophers. Perhaps scripture intends “nothing more” than that the former passage indicates that God’s countenance toward man was darkened in that time, and in the latter that God is telling us that his promises are sure.
But even if we grant that Num 23:19 “trumps” Gen 6:6, we must agree that Gen 6:6 means something. In the ARBCA view it means nothing. Similarly, the legion of scriptural passages which attribute an emotion to God, which everyone acknowledges as mysterious and not the same thing at all as the passions of men, must mean something lest you make the Holy Spirit into a woefully incompetent inspirer of scripture. But that is exactly what ARBCA does. ARBCA sweeps aside all such passages, not as anthropomorphic (to which there is little disagreement) but as solely anthropomorphic with no meaning whatsoever, apart from at times an unsatisfying, unfalsifiable, baseless assertion that while they have no connection to god’s non-existent feelings, to whom they are attributed, they are somewhat indicative of how man would feel and respond, if he were in a similar situation. The underlying ARBCA false dichotomy is this: either God has no changes in his disposition whatsoever, no righteous anger and no divine pleasure in anything, including the Son, yes everything is anthropomorphic to the point of meaningless, either that or he (God) is as free and careless with his emotions as any man.
They do this, present false dichotomies, throughout. You either accept their version of DDI or, in another example they use (Abraham and Isaac) you are not unlike an Open Theist.
Their self-serving false dilemmas are challengeable by many human analogies. I recently watched a show where the protagonist had to report to prison the following day. The night before he and his wife had a happy, loving last night together. But the next day they both grieved as he left her embrace and reported to prison. They had certain foreknowledge of what was to happen. They dealt with a sort of immutability. And yet their dispositions changed. Perhaps it is so with God. God knew from eternity that Abraham would be prepared to sacrifice his son. God knew from eternity that Abraham feared and trusted him. But that doesn’t mean that God could not have been “pleased” (whatever that means, but it means something) when the event took place.
I don’t know that my analogy is apt. I am not an ARBCA theologian who elevates speculation to critical doctrine. But I do know this—the incoherent ramblings in the ARBCA position paper do not, by any standard or definition of the word, prove that that their view of DDI is true which would render my analogy as false.
The most monstrous position in the ARBCA paper, because it is utterly misleading, is their argument that Christ, in his divine nature, did not suffer on the cross. They write:
What Christ suffered he did so as punishment for human sin due to the justice of God and according to his human nature. Positing divine suffering ends up being a form of theopassianism (i.e., God suffered) or a form of patripassianism (i.e., the Father suffered)But this is not the argument. One must be careful whether one is affirming that God died (nobody is—Red Herring) or, as Martin Luther affirmed, that God (the Second Person) suffered horribly on the cross 4 when he was forsaken, which is, more properly, theopaschitism. This is yet another point about which the ARBCA theologians are unimaginably sloppy. The question of the God of Father is irrelevant to the point at hand, unless the ARBCA theologians are descending into the error of modalism.
1 As a trivial example, from our perspective the second person of the trinity, somewhere around 4 BCE, took on a human nature. He had none from infinity before, but he had one then and will forever more. That is, most would agree, a somewhat obvious change. Yet is some way that we can barely glimpse, God’s transcendence rescues immutability. God is, outside of time, absolutely unchangeable, and there was no chance, in our time, that the Second Person would not take on a human nature when he did.
2 Just like what ever it means for God to love and hate, it means something, and God's disposition toward Jacob was categorically different than his disposition toward Esau.
3 Gee, you think so?
4 I have some reason to suspect that the ARBCA theologians, being (in their minds) the modern scholastics, do not hold Luther in high regard. At the very least they do not consider him Truly Reformed.
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