Why deny impassibility? The reasoning often revolves around the idea that God must have emotions like us or else he is a basically like a stone, that is, an unmoving thing that is not even alive. This assertion should be met with incredulity. Is this really so? God must either be just like us or else not even alive? Are those really the only options? This is, of course, a false dilemma and has been recognized as such from the early centuries of the church. God is alive in a higher sense than creatures are. For God to be fully actual means that God is alive in a superlative sense, that is, in a way compared to which we are only sort of alive!

The past two centuries have witnessed the rise of what can be called “relational theism,” which can be defined as an umbrella term for a number of different doctrines of God ranging from theistic personalism to open theism to dynamic panentheism. They can be ranged on a spectrum from relatively conservative to extremely radical, but they all have one major characteristic that differentiates them from the classical theism of the orthodox Christian tradition and that is that they all teach that God in himself is affected and thus changed by creatures. This is a denial of Divine immutability and it often begins with a denial of Divine impassibility.

What is Impassibility?

Divine impassibility means that God does not have emotions as we do. When we speak of God’s love or God’s mercy, we technically are speaking of affections that reflect a perfection in God that we see reflected imperfectly in us. We speak of a human attribute that partially and imperfectly describes an aspect of God’s nature. All of God’s attributes are really one with God’s nature because God is simple and not made up of parts. We use different terms to describe multiple attributes because God, viewed from a finite perspective by creatures in space and time like us, is hard to describe in any one word. We use many words – immutable, eternal, self-existent, love, holy, etc. – to describe in finite language as much as we can express of the infinite being of God. We are not saying nothing because our language, which God has revealed, is capable of expressing truth about God. But we are also not speaking univocally as if God’s love was exactly the same as creaturely love. We are in the middle in that we speak analogously; we are able to say something true about God with the understanding that everything we say has to be qualified by other things that can be said about God. It is our finite perspective and our finite minds that ultimately make us dependent on revelation.

Scripture reveals God as the Creator and thus as the First Cause of all that is not God. God is Pure Act and his nature as Pure Act is what makes it possible for him to be the First Cause. Only an unactualized actualizer, who contained no potentiality, could be the First Cause. This is because if he was mixture of potentiality and actuality (as all creatures are) then he himself would require a cause in order for his potentiality to be actualized. But he does not require a cause because of his unique, perfect, fully actualized being. Existence is part of his essence, whereas existence and essence can be separated in creatures. Since God is Pure Act, he is unchanging in his being and therefore immutable and impassible.

Here is where many revisionist theologians depart from historic, Christian orthodoxy. They deny that God is impassible, which means that God is not immutable, which means that God changes. The ripple effect is massive and the consequences are extremely serious for the doctrine of God.

Why Deny Impassibility?

But why deny impassibility? The reasoning often revolves around the idea that God must have emotions like us or else he is a basically like a stone, that is, an unmoving thing that is not even alive. This assertion should be met with incredulity. Is this really so? God must either be just like us or else not even alive? Are those really the only options? This is, of course, a false dilemma and has been recognized as such from the early centuries of the church. God is alive in a higher sense than creatures are. For God to be fully actual means that God is alive in a superlative sense, that is, in a way compared to which we are only sort of alive!

This unique concept of the Divine life is the context in which we understand Jesus’s statement: “I am the Life” (John 14:6). Jesus also says: “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself” (John 5:26). For the Father to have life in himself is what we mean by Divine aseity; his existence is part of his essence. And for the Son to have life in himself is a clear claim to deity – in fact it is a claim to be one in being (homoousios) with the Father. It is the kind of biblical teaching the the Nicene Creed expresses in fidelity to revelation.

So, the fact that God cannot be affected and changed by the creature does not mean that God is dead; rather, it means that the Divine life is the source of all creaturely life. It means that God is fully actual – perfect – and that to think of him as changing is to denigrate his deity. If he changed, he could be changing for the better (implying that he was less good before) or he could be changing for the worse (implying that he is getting worse as time goes on). It is hard to decide which option is less worthy of God! Both have historically been rejected by the central tradition of the Church.

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