This article entitled “Does God Really Feel?” is adapted from Untangling Emotions by J. Alasdair Groves and Winston T. Smith. (original source – https://www.crossway.org/articles/does-god-really-feel/)

Does God Have Emotions?

Yes, God does have emotions.

Unpacking that truth, however, can be tricky. The discussion touches on an important point of theology: God’s impassibility. If you are familiar with that doctrine, you know the theology can get technical and hard to follow pretty quickly. And, complicating matters, theologians don’t all agree. For those of you new to the subject, impassibility is the doctrine that God is not able to suffer or be changed by involuntary passions.

The basic concern here is an important one: the Bible is clear that God is not dependent on his creation in any way (i.e., he is truly transcendent), and therefore he cannot be at its mercy, involuntarily affected by it, reeling in reaction to what he has made, and thus on some level controlled by it. In other words, what he has created cannot afflict him with suffering or make him feel anything.

Right off the bat you might think that it actually sounds like God doesn’t have emotions. If God is unaffected by his creation, then—well—he can’t feel anything about it good or bad. But that isn’t what the doctrine of impassibility is getting at. The issue isn’t really whether or not God has emotions but what they are like. Does God experience emotions the way we do? Some theologians argue that he does and that this is basic to his ability to empathize with us. Other theologians argue that he does not experience emotions as we do at all. If he did, his emotions would make him as willy-nilly as we are, and we could no longer consider him reliably stable (i.e., immutable).

Does It Really Matter?

This can sound a bit abstract and philosophical already, and you might be wondering, does impassibility really matter? It does. It really matters both that God has emotions and that they are different from ours in important ways.

God Really Understands and Cares for Us

For most of us it matters a great deal that God has emotions for very personal reasons. At stake is whether or not God really understands and cares about our experiences, especially our suffering. To say that God is impassible seems to suggest that perhaps he doesn’t. Since he can’t suffer, how could he possibly understand? And if he doesn’t understand, how could he care? We want to know that God relates to us emotionally without having the problems that our emotions create for us.

So let us be clear: God does understand, and he does care.

Hopefully we’ve made it clear all along that Jesus provides the clearest understanding of both our emotions and God’s. In particular, Jesus’s role as High Priest demonstrates God’s commitment to relating with us emotionally. Hebrews 4 says:

For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet was without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Heb. 4:15–16)

God’s empathy is rooted in Christ’s work. Jesus is our foundation for understanding how God relates to us emotionally.

God cared enough about understanding us that God the Son stepped into our shoes by taking on a human nature. Jesus’s flesh and bone are proof that God has established a deep connection to our emotional experience and he wants us to know about it. In fact, he demonstrates his solidarity with us, in particular, through Jesus’s suffering. Jesus’s trials and temptations validate the bond he has with us as our Priest, the One who can truly represent us to God in our misery. Jesus really suffered as a flesh-and-blood human being. He really gets it, so when he tells us that he cares, we can know that he means it. And because he really gets it and experienced suffering without sin, God the Son can faithfully communicate that experience to his Father.

God’s Emotions Are Different

But impassibility matters for other reasons as well. Some important attributes of God are at stake. In particular, whatever similarity exists between God’s emotions and ours ought not undermine God’s unchanging character (immutability), which undergirds his faithfulness and ability to save us.

So in what sense does God have emotions? Traditionally theologians have made a distinction between passions and affections. Historically passions described the more physical aspect of emotions, which, as we explained earlier, means that to some extent our bodies are always shaping our emotions. We don’t want to say that about God, though, because God doesn’t have a body, and God doesn’t get cranky when his blood sugar drops. The church fathers used the term passions to describe what God doesn’t have in order to defend against heresies which taught that the Father suffered on the cross¹ or that God compromised his divine nature² in order to accomplish salvation. In this sense, we ought to deny that God has passions. He is impassible, meaning that the creation or his creatures cannot push him around emotionally.

At the same time, this does not mean that God lacks affections, which we today might call “feelings.” Traditionally, the word affections has described an emotion rooted in a moral value. Pastor and theologian Kevin DeYoung explains:

If we are equating emotions with the old sense of passions, then God doesn’t have emotions. But if we are talking about affections, he does. God’s emotions are cognitive affections involving his construal of a situation. Most of what we call emotion in God is his evaluation of what is happening with his creation.³

DeYoung goes on to capture the core beauty of God’s impassibility by saying that God “is love to the maximum at every moment. He cannot change because he cannot possibly be any more loving, or any more just, or any more good. God cares for us, but it is not a care subject to spasms or fluctuations of intensity.”⁴ Thus, while it might appear at first that the doctrine of God’s impassibility will leave us with a cold, distant, and disconnected deity, instead the exact opposite is true: the glorious fact that God cannot and does not change means we can completely rely on his heart bursting with love, compassion, pity, tenderness, and anger at injustice; we can delight in his works, knowing he will always do them with these attributes without tiring. God’s impassibility is actually the grounding hope of our ability to know and trust his emotions.

Isaiah 49:15 says:

Can a woman forget her nursing child,
that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb?
Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.

Rob Lister applies this passage to God’s emotional life:

When we argue that God is impassible in the sense of being insusceptible to involuntary emotional manipulation, we mean that he is impassible not because he is affectively weak, but rather because he is affectively strong and full. God is more passionate than we are about the things that matter most.⁵

In other words, God doesn’t have passions in that he is not jerked around by creation. God doesn’t have “good” days and “bad” days. The early fathers were not arguing that God is dispassionate but rather speaking in a philosophically credible way about how God is different from creatures. But these impassibility formulations should not compel us to say that God is in no way like us emotionally. We are passible and God is impassible. God is not like us in some important ways, and he is like us in important ways. God is energetically enthused and emotionally invested in creation by his own free and consistent choice, but God’s emotional life does not compromise his character or change his essence.

The Mystery of Faith

All Christian doctrine is at some point an expression of mystery. God is not just a different version of us; he is distinct from us as the Creator. Whether you’re talking about the doctrine of the Trinity, the incarnation, or the problem of evil, everything is going to have a mystery at its bedrock. The goal of this appendix is not to say everything that can be said, but merely to point out that in order for us to know God as God, we must admit that we are knowing someone who transcends our complete understanding. While we affirm that what can be said about God can be said truly and accurately in so far as God has revealed himself to us, we must draw the line of mystery where God stops speaking.⁶

A Simple and Certain Hope

Let’s return to the issue at stake for most readers: When you’re suffering, does God care? Of course God cares if you’re suffering. Not only does he care; he cares that you know he understands. Because Jesus is our High Priest, Jesus in his human nature understands suffering existentially and physically. Because of both Jesus’s purity and his human passion, God is uniquely qualified to empathize with you in Christ.

In order to keep a balanced view of God’s emotional life, always return to the Trinity as the picture of the divine emotional life. The Father sympathizes with you and sends Christ to take an active role in your life. The Son empathizes with you directly through his human nature. And the Holy Spirit empathizes imminently through his indwelling in you (Rom. 8:26).

Notes:

1. Patripassianism is an error of modalism, the belief that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are simply three “modes” of one being, rather than distinct persons; and so God the Father actually suffered on the cross.
2. Monophysitism is the heresy that Christ has only one nature instead of two, human and divine. Monophysitism would imply that Jesus suffered in his divine nature, making the divine contingent on the creation.
3. Kevin DeYoung, “’Tis Mystery All, the Immortal Dies: Why the Gospel of Christ’s Suffering Is More Glorious because God Does Not Suffer” (edited transcript of a presentation at the T4G conference of 2010), 11, www.google.com/search?ei=1fl5W8jTNdGO5wL FiqLwBg&q=T4G-2010-KDY-v_2.pdf. DeYoung provides a more technical but very accessible discussion of impassibility.
4. DeYoung, “’Tis Mystery All,” 9.
5. Rob Lister, God Is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013), 215.
6. Incomprehensibility is the doctrine that God cannot be known exhaustively (see, e.g., Deut. 29:29).

James Renihan (PhD) is President of IRBS Theological Seminary in Mansfield, TX. He has authored several books including True Love and Edification and Beauty. 

(original source here:
https://credomag.com/article/what-is-impassibility/ )

The doctrine of Divine Impassibility is an ancient Christian belief, confessed throughout the long history of the Church, and yet often misunderstood or rejected today. It reflects classical Christian theism, and its import is well-known by theologians and has been fixed for centuries. It is deeply rooted in the Christian tradition and confessed by every major English Protestant church—both the 1552 42 Articles of the Church of England and their 1563 revision known as the 39 Articles; the 1647 Westminster Confession of Faith; the 1658 Savoy Declaration of the English Congregational churches, and the 1677/89 Second London Confession of the Baptists, (reprinted in America with two additions in 1742 as the Philadelphia Confession). And yet over the past 150 years this teaching has been criticized, modified and rejected, so that today it is an unpopular doctrine among evangelical theologians.

Impassibility with an i

Before we begin our brief study, we must take note of two things. In the first place, since the word may be easily confused with a similar homophone, we must briefly speak about the spelling of the term. The theological word is impassibility (with an i in the middle), not impassability (with an a in the middle). The latter perhaps refers to the problem your Fiat 500 might have overtaking a Corvette on a highway, or to an impassable flooded road after a heavy storm, or perhaps to the impasse reached because of the inability of two sides to conclude a negotiation. But it does not refer to our doctrine!

Second and more importantly, we must remember that any examination of God and the teaching about Him recorded in Scripture must be done in the context of devotion. The words of Leviticus 10:3 provide the context for our study: “By those who come near Me I must be regarded as holy; And before all the people I must be glorified.” Our discussions of theology must be carried on in this context.

The Way of Negation and the Way of Eminence

Impassibility may be defined in this way: “God does not experience emotional changes either from within or effected by his relationship to creation.”[1] It is a necessary complement to the doctrine of divine immutability, expressing the fact that God is unchangeable in his essence or being, and in his outward acts in the world.

Christian theologians recognize that there is a fundamental distinction between the Creator and the creature. God alone has life and immortality. He needs no one and is perfection itself. We are not like this. Humans are dependent beings, relying on him for life and all things. For this reason, Christian theologians have acknowledged that it is easier to say what God is not than what he is. This has been called the Way of Negation. Impassibility is one of many such negations. Just as God is infinite—not finite, immortal—not subject to mortality, incomprehensible—beyond our ability to comprehend and immutable—not changeable, so also God is impassible. He is not subject to passions.

On the other hand, when making positive assertions about God, our teachers have expressed the Way of Eminence. This principle teaches us that when God is described to us in terms of human virtues, we recognize that those virtues exist originally, eternally, essentially, and perfectly (i.e., eminently) in God. Since he is infinite, eternal and unchangeable in his being, he is perfect in all that he is. His love, mercy, justice etc. are infinite, eternal and unchangeable virtues. Our problem is that we forget this basic truth and impute human characteristics to God. This is the root of modern exceptions to the historic Christian doctrine. It makes God over in the image of humanity. God is love; divine love, infinite, eternal and unchangeable love. His love does not increase or decrease, it is what he is.

Without passions

One of the most famous statements of this doctrine may be found in the Westminster Confession of Faith. In its Chapter 2 we read,

There is but one only, living, and true God who is infinite in Being and Perfection, a most pure Spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most absolute . . .

The phrase “without … passions” refers to the doctrine of divine impassibility. It has been consistently confessed by Christians through the ages. At the time of the Reformation, the Church of England declared in 1552 and 1563 in its 42 Articles and 39 Articles that,

There is but one living, and true God, and he is everlasting with out body, parts, or passions, of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness, the maker, and preserver of all things both visible, and invisible.

The Irish Articles of 1615 followed suit in almost identical words, and the great Puritan confessions continued this trajectory. These confessional documents establish a tradition of the doctrine of God which specifically incorporates the doctrine of divine impassibility.[2] It is a necessary component of classical Christian theism. Herman Bavinck said,

Those who predicate any change whatsoever of God, whether with respect to his essence, knowledge, or will, diminish all his attributes: independence, simplicity, eternity, omniscience, and omnipotence. This robs God of his divine nature, and religion of its firm foundation and assured comfort.[3]

Expressions of effect, not affect

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. John Owen responded to them:

Quest. Are there not according to the perpetuall tenor of the Scriptures, affections and passions in God, as Anger, Fury, Zeale, Wrath, Love, Hatred, Mercy, Grace, Jealousy, Repentance, Grief, Ioy, Feare? Concerning which he [Owen’s Socinian opponent, John Biddle] labours to make the Scriptures determine in the affirmative . . .To the whole I aske, whither these things are in the Scripture ascribed properly unto God, denoting such affections & passions in him as those in us are, which are so termed, or whither they are assigned to Him, & spoken of him Metaphorically, only in reference to his outward workes and dispensations, correspondent and answering to the actings of men, in whom such affections are, and under the power whereof they are in those actings. If the latter be affirmed, then as such an attribution of them unto God, is eminently consistent with All his infinite Perfections, and Blessednesse, so there can be no difference about this Question, and the answers given thereunto; all men readily acknowledge, that in this sence the Scripture doth ascribe all the affections mentioned unto God.[4]

Here, Owen seeks to employ the Way of Eminence. While Scripture in some places does seem to attribute emotions to God, we must look past the human language to the perfections they signify. For example, love is in God as an eternal perfection, not as a passion brought about by an encounter with the creature. Theologians have often said that when God is described in the language of human emotion, these are expressions of effect, not affect. In other words, we are reading about the effects God causes us to experience of himself, not effects that we have caused God to experience in himself. If we read of them in the same way that we experience human passions and affections, we diminish God, making him only a greater version of ourselves.

Do not tinker with it

More recently, Clark Pinnock wrote,

Impassibility is undoubtedly the Achilles heel of conventional thinking. It was as self-evident to our ancestors as it is out of question for us, but as soon as one tinkers with it the edifice trembles.[5]

Pinnock, who denied impassibility and became an advocate of Open Theism, acknowledges that repudiating impassibility necessitates a complete revision of the classical Christian doctrine! Divine impassibility must be maintained, or the church will lose its identity.

Writing nearly 340 years ago, the great Puritan John Owen could say of the doctrine of divine impassibility:

It is agreed by all that those expressions of “repenting, “grieving,” and the like, are figurative, wherein no such affections are intended as those words signify in created natures, but only an event of things like that which proceedeth from such affections.[6]

Our prayer is that these words may be written again today.

Endnotes

[1] Samuel D. Renihan, God Without Passions: A Primer (Palmdale: RBAP, 2015) 19.

[2] Some portions of this article are taken from my chapter “The Doctrine of Divine Impassibility: “Pre-Reformation through Seventeenth-Century England” in Ronald S. Baines, Richard C. Barcellos, James P. Butler, Stefan T. Lindblad and James M. Renihan, Confessing the Impassible God (Palmdale: RBAP, 2015).

[3] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, gen. ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003-2008), 2:158.

[4] John Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae Or, The Mystery of the Gospel Vindicated, and Socinianisme Examined (Oxford: Printed by Leon. Lichfield, 1655), 73. This page is incorrectly numbered 65 in the original. The spelling is original.

[5] Clark H. Pinnock, Most Moved Mover: A Theology of God’s Openness (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2001), 77.

[6] John Owen, The Works of John Owen, 23 vols. (Edinburgh; Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1965-1991), 21:257, emphasis added.

“Scripture itself leads us in describing God in the most manifold relations to all his creatures. While immutable in himself, he nevertheless, as it were lives the life of his creatures and participates in all their changing states. Yet, however anthropomorphic its language, it at the same time prohibits us from positing any change in God himself… In fact, God’s incomprehensible greatness and, by implication, the glory of the Christian confession are precisely that God, though immutable in himself, can call mutable creatures into being. Though eternal in himself, God can nevertheless enter into time and, though immeasurable in himself, he can fill every cubic inch of space with his presence. In other words, though he himself is absolute being, God can give to transient beings a distinct existence of their own. In God’s eternity there exists not a moment in time; in his immensity there is not a speck of space; in his being there is no sign of becoming. There is nothing intermediate between these two classes of categories: a deep chasm separates God’s being from that of all creatures. It is the mark of God’s greatness that he can condescend to the level of his creatures and that, though transcendent, he can dwell immanently in all created being. Without losing himself, God can give himself, and while absolutely maintaining his immutability, he can enter into infinite number of relations to his creatures.”

• Reformed Dogmatics: Volume 2