Immutability and Impassibility

Article by Sam Renihan (original source here)

You may have seen a popular commercial advertising the Snickers candy bar in which grumpy persons are pacified by eating chocolate, nuts, and caramel. The premise of this scene is summed up in the words “You’re not you when you’re hungry.” We can, of course, resonate with this statement. Some people even talk about being “hangry.” They are angry because they are hungry. We have natural appetites (inclinations and disinclinations), and our moods change as our appetites are satisfied or dissatisfied. There truly are times when the difference between being content and irritable depends on a Snickers bar (or double stuff Oreos).

We know what we are like, but is God like this? Does God experience emotional change? If we answer this question based on popular Christian music, and even popular Christian literature, we would reply that God does experience emotional change. But the Christian creeds, the Christian tradition of theology proper (the doctrine of God), and the Protestant and Reformed confessions of faith disagree.

What do the Scriptures teach about emotions and God, and how can we formulate a responsible and faithful answer? We will consider four points, focusing on how God describes himself in the Scriptures, and how God teaches us to interpret his own language regarding himself.

1. The Bible describes God in the language of human experience and emotion, but denies that those very experiences are in God.

In 1 Samuel 15:11, God declares, “I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and has not performed my commandments.” Later in 1 Samuel 15:29, the same passage, this statement is qualified and controlled. “And also the Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man, that he should have regret.” Other passages, like Numbers 23:19-20, reinforce the truth that the difference between God and creatures controls the way we read creaturely language about God. It says, “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?”

2. The Bible describes God in a way that makes it impossible for him to undergo anything or be acted upon.

Take Genesis 1:1 into consideration. There is a Creator, and there is creation. God did not create something greater or more powerful than himself, nor did he confine himself within the time and space of his creation. God is eternal and a se, of himself, and all things are “from him and through him and to him” (Rom. 11:36). Consequently, God is always the agent, never the patient. God is always fulfilling his purposes and never changing his mind, as stated in Numbers 23:19-20, above.

Similarly, several of the names of God, especially “I AM THAT I AM,” are self-revelation using the word “to be.” God is that he is. He is perfect absolute independent being, the source of all that exists, the Creator of all things. Nothing can add to God who is I AM. Nothing can subtract from God who is I AM. Neither can God make himself more perfect or reduce his perfection. 

God himself declares his perfect unchanging nature to his people in Malachi 3:6, “For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.” And we are told the same in James 1:17, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”

The truth that the Bible describes God in the language of human experience and emotion, yet denies that those experiences are in God, combined with the Scriptures’ description of the perfection of the being of God, provides a firm and certain conclusion.

3. We must not equate the human language used to describe God with God himself.

We can no more contain God in our language than you can contain the ocean in a thimble. The finite cannot contain the infinite. Thus, our minds and language can never wrap themselves around God and fully express him. But although we cannot know God fully, we can know him truly. God’s self-revelation may be suited to our creaturely capacities, but it is not false or empty. 

Many authors have described God’s self-revelation through creaturely communication as God lisping to us or stammering with us, as parents or nurses speak to children. If God spoke to us in a manner that communicated the infinity of his being and power, we would never understand it. We can’t understand it. So, God speaks in our language, in creature-language. And as a result, we can’t think that God has been contained in that language. We can’t run straight from the creature language to the Creator without protecting that language or qualifying it, as the Scriptures themselves have taught us.

There are two sides to be balanced here. And we can end up in two ditches. On the one hand, we can’t reduce God to the creaturely language used to describe him. God is not like us. But on the other hand, we have to remember that these passages are still telling us something. God is speaking to us in our language, and while we can’t equate him with our language, that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing for us to learn. Quite the opposite.

For example, when Scripture speaks of God repenting, regretting, or relenting, the point of connection is not between the emotional state of a human that repents and some emotional state in God, but in the action taken. When someone repents, they stop doing what they were doing, and they begin to do something else. So also, God created man, then he destroyed man; God made Saul king, then he removed him; God threatened judgment on Nineveh, then he removed the sentence of judgment.

You can call that repentance because of the analogy between God’s action and human actions, without taking along with it the baggage of human emotional turmoil. When we repent, it’s because something confronts us, and we are changed. Spiritually speaking, we turn from sin to righteousness. Generally speaking, we encounter some problem, we regret a decision, and we redo something or do something else. But God is eternal and has foreordained whatsoever comes to pass, accomplishing all his holy will. So, God’s repentance is not an undergoing or a happening to God, but from the creature’s perspective in time it is a reversal of actions, all of which was decreed by God in eternity. God decreed from all eternity both to create man, and to destroy him, to make Saul king, and then to remove him, to threaten Nineveh, and then to deliver it. We see it all play out in time. The sequence of God’s actions in time leads to a fourth point.

4. We need to distinguish between our eternal God in himself, and the outworking of his decree in time and space.

God is not limited by time. He is eternal. He created time. And everything that God has done, is doing, and will do in time is the fulfillment or the outworking of his eternal decree. This means that if we ascribe things like emotions to God, or reactions like repenting, relenting, regretting, or being provoked to wrath, and if we understand those as God existing in time and acting in time rather than the outworking of his eternal and singular decree, we will have collapsed eternity and time, and collapsed the Creator into a creature. God’s decree is one simple cause with an unfathomable (to us) multitude of effects, all of which coalesce in the glory of God through the redemption of the elect in the death and resurrection of Christ, and the judgment of the unbelieving.

What this all boils down to is that we speak of God in a way that fits with his infinite being and perfection. And we speak of creatures in a way that fits their finite being and imperfection. The Scriptures themselves teach us to do this when we consider what they say about God, about creatures, and about God described in the language of creatures. These four considerations prepare us to answer our original question more specifically. Does God experience emotional change? Is God not God when he’s hungry? Thankfully, God is not a man.

First, love.

God is Love, who is good in and of himself, pouring goodness on his creatures. This means that when God does good to his creatures, he is loving them. And he is not loving them because of something good in them that he is perceiving and responding to, but he is loving them because he is love. He is doing good because he is good. Love for us is when we perceive some good, and are drawn toward it, and reciprocate good to it. We must apply love to creatures and the Creator differently, according to their being. Therefore, God is love, essentially. We love him, because he first loved us. His love is an everlasting perfection, not an emotion. And this makes John’s words all the sweeter when he says in 1 John 4:16, “So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”

Second, mercy.

Mercy, again must be applied to creatures in one way, and to God in another. Men are moved to mercy when they perceive a need in another like them. We are merciful because we suffer and feel alongside of another person. We enter into their state and we pity them. We are overcome by sympathy or compassion. We help those to whom we relate in their suffering.

It is not so with God. God does not suffer. He cannot undergo or be acted upon. Does that mean he cannot be merciful? Quite to the contrary. God is the one who helps the helpless even though there is no connection between his nature and the helpless person. And because he is free from those kinds of restrictions, he is able to have mercy on anyone and everyone that he wills.

We are moved to sympathy because we see something of ourselves in another person. We don’t feel mercy for rocks being smashed. If God is so different than us, couldn’t he say the same? No, because the less God’s mercy is conditioned upon his participation in our nature, the greater he is able to be merciful to all as he wills. Romans 10:13 assures us of this truth. “For ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

Do not equate mercy in mankind with mercy in God. If you do, God cannot have mercy at all. But God is perfectly merciful. Mercy workers get overwhelmed. They see a lot of suffering and they sometimes have to stop or take breaks. Ministers in the ministry experience this. God is not subject to such weakness. He is like an immune ebola doctor. That’s the God I need, not the doctor who might get sick from me or with me. God’s mercy is a perfection, not a passion or affection. God’s mercy is his helping the helpless. And therefore, God is the most merciful because he helps those that are entirely unlike him, and he helps those that no one else would help.

So, we can sincerely say with Jeremiah in Lamentations 3:21-24, “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. ‘The LORD is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’”

Third, anger.

This is probably the best example of the problem of human language. We get angry. Is God perfectly and eternally and infinitely angry? No. So, why do the Scriptures so often refer to God as being angry? Remove the passion from anger. When creatures get angry they cause some punishment or revenge to be poured out on the object of their wrath.

In men, our anger leads us to all kinds of terrible and wicked revenges. But in God, anger describes God’s perfect and unstoppable justice. God will cause the wicked to be punished. God will pour out judgment and punishment upon the unrighteous. God will punish sin. So, you can’t make God angry. God isn’t eternally burning with anger. Rather we use the term angry to describe God’s immutable justice. And whereas we get angry and can’t do anything about it, God perfectly brings judgment on the objects of his wrath.

It’s very difficult to think about anger without passion. There is righteous anger, but our anger is brought about by something we perceive to be bad, whether we are right or wrong. God is angry in the sense that he will cause justice and vengeance to be poured out on the unrepentant and wicked. His anger is therefore an eternal perfection, not an emotion as it is in us. 

God’s perfections of love, mercy, and justice being free from all passion, not being emotions, is what theologians refer to as impassibility. Because God is God, I AM THAT I AM, and because he is the eternal Creator, he is unchangeable, always accomplishing his purposes, but never being acted upon. God pours out love, mercy, and justice from the unchanging infinity of his perfect being. And though the Scriptures describe God in creaturely language, and though we experience God’s perfections of love, mercy, and justice in temporal sequences, we cannot conclude from our creaturely perspective that God is emotional. Rather, as the Scriptures have taught us, what we call emotions are unchanging essential perfections in God.

So, we can say with the Psalmist,

“Oh give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever! Let Israel say, ‘His steadfast love endures forever.’ Let the house of Aaron say, ‘His steadfast love endures forever.’ Let those who fear the LORD say, ‘His steadfast love endures forever’ (Psalm 118:1-4).

God’s Impassibility and Feelings

Dr. Joseph R. Nally, Jr., D.D., M.Div. is the Theological Editor at Third Millennium Ministries (IIIM). (original article here)

Question: Does God have feelings?

Answer:

The Westminster Confession of Faith (2.1 – Of God, and of the Holy Trinity) states:

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 free, most absolute; working all things according to the counsel of His own immutable and most righteous will, for His own glory; most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him; and withal, most just, and terrible in His judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty.

So, what should we understand concerning God’s impassibility?
When we read Scripture we see mention of many of God’s emotions such as: (1) anger (Deut 9:22; Psa 7:11; Rom 1:18), (2) compassion (Judges 2:18; Deut 32:36; Psa 135:14), (3) grief (Gen 6:6; Psa 78:40), (4) hate (Psa 5:5; 11:5; Prov 6:16), (5) jealousy (Exod 20:5; 34:14; Josh 24:19), (6) joy (Isa 62:5; Jer 32:41; Zeph 3:17), (7) laughter (Psa 2:4; 37:13; Prov 1:26), and (8) love (Jer 31:3; John 3:16; 1 John 4:8). God has these emotions! So, what could the Westminster divines be talking about when they write ‘without passions’?

The divines mean that God does not exhibit these emotions as mere humans do! He does not have mood swings. All of God’s emotions are rooted in his holy nature and are always expressed sinlessly. They flow from his perfection the way he has perfectly ordained them.
For instance, the Lord’s anger is rooted in his divine justice. His justice is pure, right, and holy. Thus his anger is perfectly righteous and predictable, never capricious (changeable or fickle) or malicious. So, in his anger, God never sins (Jas 1:13).

Here are some helpful quotes:

Charles Hodge

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. . . Here again we have to choose between a mere philosophical speculation and the clear testimony of the Bible, and of our own moral and religious nature. Love of necessity involves feeling, and if there be no feeling in God, there can be no love. . . . The philosophical objection against ascribing feeling to God, bears, as we have seen, with equal force against the ascription to Him of knowledge or will. If that objection be valid, He becomes to us simply an unknown cause, what men of science call force; that to which all phenomena are to be referred, but of which we know nothing. We must adhere to the truth in its Scriptural form, or we lose it altogether. We must believe that God is love in the sense in which that word comes home to every human heart. (Systematic Theology)

James Petigru Boyce

The immutability thus set forth in the Scriptures and implied in the simplicity and absolute perfection of God is not, however, to be so understood as to deny in him some real ground for the Scripture statements of emotional feeling in the exercise of joy, pity, longsuffering and mercy, or of anger, wrath and avenging justice. We could as well deny some real ground for the attributes of love, justice and truth, which are at the basis of these emotions. (Abstract of Systematic Theology)

Benjamin B. Warfield

We have a God who is capable of self-sacrifice for us…. Now herein is a wonderful thing. Men tell us that God is, by very necessity of His own nature, incapable of passion, incapable of being moved by inducement from without; that he dwells in holy calm and unchangeable blessedness, untouched by human sufferings or human sorrows for ever, – haunting
The lucid interspace of world and world,

 Where never creeps a cloud, nor moves a wind,

Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,

Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,

Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar 
His sacred, everlasting calm.

Let us bless God that it is not true. God can feel; God does love. We have Scriptural warrant for believing, as it has been perhaps somewhat inadequately but not misleadingly phrased, that moral heroism has a place within the sphere of the divine nature: we have Scriptural warrant for believing that, like the hero of Zurich, God has reached out loving arms and gathered to his own bosom that forest of spears which otherwise had pierced ours. But is not this gross anthropomorphism? We are careless of names: it is the truth of God. And we decline to yield up the God of the Bible and the God of our hearts to any philosophical abstraction. We have and we must have an ethical God; a God whom we can love, in whom we can trust. (Biblical and Theological Studies)

John M. Frame

Although God’s eternal decree does not change, it does ordain change. It ordains a historical series of events, each of which receives God’s evaluation. God evaluates different events in different ways. Those evaluations themselves are fixed in Gods eternal plan. But they are genuine evaluations of the events. It is not wrong to describe them as responses to these events.
Furthermore, we have seen that God is not only transcendent beyond time and space, but also immanent in all times and spaces. From these immanent perspectives, God views each event from within history. As he does, he evaluates each event appropriately, when it happens. Such evaluations are, in the most obvious sense, responses.

Does such responsiveness imply passivity in God? To say so would be highly misleading. God responds (both transcendently and immanently) only to what he has himself ordained. He has chosen to create a world that will often grieve him. So ultimately he is active, rather than passive. Some may want to use the term impassible to indicate that fact. (The Doctrine of God)

K. Scott Oliphint

There can be no question that the relation one has to God will significantly alter ones own disposition and destiny. That much is certainly true. But is it adequate simply to think that when Scripture speaks of God being gracious, on the one hand, and wrathful, on the other, the same disposition in God causes these differences in us? Is God’s anger toward one person an identical disposition as his grace and covenant love toward another? There seems to be no reasons to think so, and it seems clear that Scripture does not speak in these terms; such ideas violate basic linguistic sensibilities.
Rather, when Scripture says that the Lord’s anger was kindled, it really was kindled. Because God is personal, we should expect that he will react in different ways to things that please and displease him. These ascriptions of God in Scripture are not meant simply to tell us more about ourselves, but rather are meant to show us more of who God is, especially as he interacts with his human creatures. They are meant to show us who God is in light of his gracious condescension, generally, and of the gospel, more specifically, as given progressively throughout covenant history. (God With Us: Divine Condescension and the Attributes of God)

References

Hodge, Charles. Systematic Theology (1871-73). Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1989.

Boyce, James P. Abstract of Systematic Theology (1887). Hanford, CA: den Dulk Foundation.

Warfield, B.B. Biblical and Theological Studies. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1968.

Frame, John M. The Doctrine of God. Phillipsburg: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2002.

Oliphant, K. Scott. God With Us: Divine Condescension and the Attributes of God. Wheaton: Crossway, 2012.

http://paulhelmsdeep.blogspot.com/2016/01/confessing-impassible-god.html