It's cheap to charge heresy

James Renihan wrote an article for Credo Magazine on What is Impassibility. He starts by teaching that impassibility is not the same as impassability, the latter referring, in his example, to the inability of one car to pass another, faster car. Well, alrighty then. That’s not too much of a waste of pixels. 

After that weighty and important discussion of homonyms, Renihan gives a definition of Impassibility:

“God does not experience emotional changes either from within or effected by his relationship to creation.”

Fair enough. His paper, his definition. But it is worth noting (which he neglects to do) that others define it differently. Very differently. For example, J.I. Packer defines it this way:

It means simply that God’s experiences do not come upon him as ours come upon us. His are foreknown, willed, and chosen by himself, and are not involuntary surprises forced on him from outside, apart form his own decision, in the way that ours regularly are.

Sproul does not so much give a definition as to describe what Impassibility is not:

Sometimes the impassibility of God is expressed philosophically in such a way as to describe God as being utterly incapable of feeling. In a desire to protect the immutability of God and to free Him from all passions that would be dependent upon the actions of the creature and to insure the constant and abiding state of pure and total felicity in God, the accent falls on His being feeling-less. This robs God of His personal character and reduces Him to an impersonal force or blob of cosmic energy.

Karl Barth writes, on Impassibility:

But the personal God has a heart. He can feel, and be affected. He is not impassible. He cannot be moved from outside by an extraneous power. But this does not mean that He is not capable of moving Himself. No, God is moved and stirred, yet not like ourselves in powerlessness, but in His own free power, in His innermost being: moved and touched by Himself, i.e., open, ready, inclined (prpensus) to compassion to another’s suffering and therefore to assistance, impelled to take the initiative to relieve this distress. It can only be a question of compassion, free sympathy, with another’s suffering. God finds no suffering in Himself. And no cause outside God can cause Him suffering if He does not will it so.

Barth, while stating explicitly that God is not impassible, nevertheless gives a rather standard definition, that God is not subject to emotions or sufferings that from outside, as the creatures are, but only those to which he wills.

I could go on. Some theologians only connect Impassibility with God’s inability to suffer. So you must watch for sleight of hand here. It is true that the Doctrine of Divine Impassibility has been around since, oh, the second century. It is not true that Renihan’s definition has held sway. Thus when Renihan writes, concerning the WCF:

The phrase “without … passions” refers to the doctrine of divine impassibility. It has been consistently confessed by Christians through the ages.

He is technically correct. However, do not be fooled into thinking that everyone (including the Westminster divines) who agrees that God is without passions would accept Renihan’s definition of Impassibility.

What really ticks me off is where Renihan goes next. But it is oh, so expected. It’s as if the modern Baptist scholastics have only one arrow in their quiver, the heresy arrow. Renihan writes:

To deny the doctrine of divine impassibility is to open the door to heresy. In the seventeenth century, this was expressed by a group of people known as Socinians.

Even if we grant that denying Impassibility, to use Renihan’s weasely cop-out language, “opens the door” to heresy, we do not need to grant that denying Reneihan’s version (which he tacitly wants you to believe is the true and timeless version, never acknowledging the theologians through the ages differed in their definition of Impassibility) does so.

He attempts to prove his case by anecdote. And it is an awful choice of anecdote. The Socinians rejected just about every orthodox doctrine. To link their heresy in any way to a rejection of Impassibility is simply bad scholarship.

Not being able to resist such a sound strategy, Renihan employs it again, telling us that Clark Pinnock denied Impassibility and became an Open Theist. This man, whom I believe is the president or provost equivalent of a seminary, is seemingly unaware of the pitfalls of arguing by anecdote: Tom survived a plane crash! Plane crashes are safe! 

An argument from anecdote is virtually pointless. The church from which the Reformers broke, because of that church's apostate view of justification, has a proud tradition of affirming Impassibility. One could just as cheaply use Rome as a rather large counter anecdote, and imply that an affirmation of Impassibility opens the door for heresy. It would be just as bad of an argument as Renihan’s. The argument that "if you deny X it opens the door for heresy" is an Argument from Intimidation. It is cheap, unworthy, scurrilous, unscholarly, and simply wrong.