26 June 2025

The God of Unchanging Glory: From Nicaea to Hegel and Back[1]

[1] Much of this paper is reworked and simplified from the third chapter of my book Intimately Forsaken: A Trinitarian Christology of the Cross (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). I am grateful for permission from my publisher to rewrite some of the same material here.

Abstract

This paper explores the enduring theological significance of divine impassibility – the doctrine that God does not suffer or undergo emotional change – in light of both its historic affirmation within classical theism and the modern movement toward divine passibility. Beginning with the rise of this modern trend, shaped by existential crises and philosophical developments from Hegel to Moltmann, the paper traces the consistent witness of the early church, scholastic theology, and Reformed orthodoxy in upholding God’s simplicity, immutability, and impassibility. Through theological, philosophical, and scriptural analysis, it contends that only the impassible God of classical theism can offer the steadfast hope and saving grace proclaimed in the gospel. In doing so, it also highlights what is lost – both doctrinally and pastorally – when divine impassibility is denied or diminished.

On Gulags and Cockroaches

A few months before the end of the Second World War Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was arrested under Article 58 of the Soviet Penal Code and sentenced to eight years in the Gulags. There he met the religious poet Anatoly Vasilyevich Silin, whose longing for a God that could understand the horrors of their suffering was expressed in the line “By grief alone is love perfected.”^[2]

It is precisely this desire that has driven the movement, since the end of the nineteenth century, towards the theological affirmation that God is not impassible, but that he suffers like us and with us.

The desire is illustrated in Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella, Metamorphosis. The story begins when Gregor Samsa awakens one morning, “from troubled dreams”^[3] and discovers that he is a cockroach. Later in the story, as the family is forced to adapt to this new reality, Grete, Gregor’s sister, sits with her mother, “pressed together almost cheek to cheek.” Their closeness leads to a “mingling their tears.”^[4] Mother and daughter look for help and stability from the father, and through tear stained faces they receive his reply. “‘My child,’ said her father compassionately and with surprising understanding, ‘but what shall we do?’” ^[5]

Kafka’s fiction captures the helplessness of humanity in the face of suffering. The father’s response also captures the very human assumption that compassion requires mutual suffering, that is, as the etymology suggests, compassion is suffering with the sufferer. The same sentiment is expressed again and again in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Dostoevsky’s Grant Inquisitor^[6] and Voltaire’s Candide, to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s scratching on the wall of his prison cell: “Only a suffering God can help.”^[7]

The assumption is driven by a desire for faithful biblical exegesis of the many passages that have been argued to present God as changing, becoming, emotional, angry, jealous, and perhaps – like the gods of Greek mythology – more like us. Several fundamental questions about the nature of God and his compassion for his creatures are raised by the driving assumption behind a passiblist hermeneutic. These questions are illustrated by way of a parable in Paul Gavrilyuk’s recent work, The Suffering of the Impassible God. It is worth quoting in full:

Consider the case of a house on fire. Several people are unable to exit the building and cry aloud desperately for help. Firemen have been called, but for some reason they do not come. A crowd is gathering around the house. Some stare at the house with a mixture of anxiety, fear, and curiosity. Some attempt to visualise as vividly as possible what the people who are in the house must be going through. These members of the crowd burst into tears, yell, tear their hair; in short, they are greatly emotionally affected. One of them has already had a fit and lies unconscious. Another has become mad and predicts the end of the world. Yet another person decides literally to suffer with those who are in the house and commits suicide by burning himself. Panic grows. A certain man from the crowd, without going through all the emotional pangs that those standing near him are experiencing, being motivated only by his conviction that the people will surely die if there is no one to help them, gets into the house and, at great risk to his own safety, rescues them.^[8]

Gavrilyuk concludes by asking “who out of all the people that were present at the scene manifested genuine compassion, the answer is obvious.”^[9]

The parable encapsulates the error of the belief that one must truly suffer with someone in order to have genuine compassion on that person, but it does not directly answer the passibilist claim that the God of the Bible suffers with us and for our salvation. We will return to this when we explore the Scriptural passages relating to impassibility and we will try to discern which set of verses – those affirming impassibility and those affirming passibility – should be determinate for our doctrine of God.

My plan in this paper is to start with the historic orthodox position on divine impassibility viewed as a consequence of divine immutability and simplicity, and then track the movement towards divine passibility in the late nineteenth century, then turn to the Scriptural issues, and finally consider why it matters and what is lost when divine impassibility is denied or minimised.

The Historic Orthodoxy of Divine Impassibility

I want first to set out the historic teaching on divine impassibility in relation to Classical Theism as a whole and demonstrate that the church has understood from the first centuries after the apostles that God is simple – that is without parts – and that he cannot suffer.

In the early centuries after Christ there are only two main works focusing completely on and affirming impassibility in the third and early fourth centuries respectively. Gregory Thaumaturgues, Ad Theopompum de Passibili et Impassibili in Deo,^[10] which tackles the issues more systematically although there are some questions over authorship, and Lactantius, De Ira Dei.^[11] In the third century Origen is often taken in the secondary literature to be a Patristic voice for divine passibility. He writes, in his Homiliae in Ezecheilem, that “The Father himself and the God of the whole universe is long suffering, full of mercy and pity. Must he not then, in some sense, be exposed to suffering? . . The Father himself is not impassible.”^[12] But those who would hold Origen as a passibilist champion tend to ignore a broad range of his theological texts such as his On First Principles, in which he sets up the established doctrine of divine simplicity in opposition to divine passibility.^[13]

Right from the Ecumenical Councils of the early church, through the Scholastic era and into Reformed orthodoxy and beyond there is almost universal assent to what we now know as Classical Theism right up to the end of the nineteenth century. Classical Theism is the constellation of historic orthodox doctrines concerning the Godhead that God is simple, immutable, impassible and timeless. We find this uniform teaching at the Council of Ephesus in 431, at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, particularly in Leo’s Tome which speaks of God as “Impassibilis Deus inviolobilis naturae,”^[14] at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and even in the First Vatican Council in 1869. All affirm Classical Theism because it was the near-universal assertion of the early church that Classical Theism best describes the God of Scripture.

As early as 180, two generations after the Apostle John, Irenaeus affirms that God is simple in his Adversus Haereses:

He is a simple, uncompounded Being, without diverse members, and altogether like, and equal to Himself, since He is wholly understanding, and wholly spirit, and wholly thought, and wholly intelligence, and wholly reason, and wholly hearing, and wholly seeing, and wholly light, and the whole source of all that is good.^[15]

This is clear very early Patristic teaching not just that God is simple but that he is metaphysically simple. Irenaeus teaches that God is without parts and that therefore his attributes as we understand them are not properties of the substance God, instead, and to use the phrase made famous recently by James Dolezal, “all that is in God is God.”^[16]

Later in the fourth century, another towering father, Hilary of Poitiers teaches that God is “not a being built up of various and lifeless portions . . . .and not compact of feeble elements.” For Hilary, “All that is within him is one.” Again, in commenting on Malachi 3:6 Hilary notes, “He who says I am, and I change not, can suffer neither change in details nor transformation in kind. For these attributes . . . are not attached to different portions of him, but meet and unite, entirely and perfectly in the whole being of the living God.”^[17]

One might respond by pointing to odd claims made by these writers, but the overall consensus is clear – the near unanimous Patristic and Conciliar voice is that the Scriptures describe God in the terms of Classical Theism. But as is often the case, the Ecumenical Councils, and to a slightly lesser extent, the Patristic theologians themselves, did not always define the doctrines of Classical Theism precisely. This task was taken up powerfully in the Scholastic and Reformed eras following directly from the near unanimous Patristic assent.

During the Reformation Calvin was involved in the French Reformed Confession of Faith (de la Rochelle). The first article speaks of divine immutability, that God cannot suffer. Later in England, the Westminster Confession of Faith states that God is “without body, parts of passions.”^[18] The exact phrase appears in the Forty-Two Aticles of 1552, the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England in 1563, the Irish Articles of 1615, the Savoy Declaration of 1658, and the Second London Confession of 1677/1689.

As I stated at the beginning of this section, my intention is to make it abundantly clear that the historic orthodox church, from the Patristics through the Reformation, gave near universal assent to the doctrines of Classical Theism, that God is simple, immutable, impassible and timeless.

The question to ask at this point is, if Classical Theism obtains and accurately describes the God of Scripture, what can be said of the divine nature itself and how should we speak of God’s nature?

In Romans 1:20 the apostle Paul speaks of God’s nature referring to his “Godness,” that is, the divine nature is what makes God, God. It is this divine nature that, as Aquinas argues following the Patristic voice, is simple, absolute and eternal. This understanding of the divine nature is adopted wholesale by the magisterial Reformers.^[19]

In the Prima Pars of Aquinas’ ST, the sections De Deo Uno and De Deo Trino, in the Treatise on the Most Holy Trinity, are, in my estimation, the best in depth writings on the doctrine of the Trinity in the history of the Church. For Aquinas’ via negativa, theological knowledge of God’s essence is limited to what God is not, he is not composite, he does not change, he does not suffer and he is not bound by time. In all these ways he is different from us his creatures and all of creation. In the Prima Pars Aquinas sets out the doctrine of divine simplicity and its implication for divine non-corporeality, goodness, infinity, immutability, eternity, and unity. “Now, because we cannot know what God is, but rather what he is not, we have no means for considering how God is, but rather how he is not.”^[20] Accordingly he defines divine simplicity as the denial of composition in God, God is not composed of parts – corporeal or metaphysical.^[21] Divine simplicity so stated logically grounds divine immutability – that God cannot change – and this in turn logically grounds divine impassibility – that God cannot suffer. Following Aquinas, most of the Schoolmen, particularly in the Dominican tradition, begin discussion of the divine attributes with simplicity. John Duns Scotus, a Fransciscan, departs from the Thomist pattern and begins with divine infinity and argues that infinity entails simplicity.^[22]

For Aquinas, the simple divine nature is not composed of parts, neither physically, metaphysically or even logically. For theists more broadly, God is not composed of physical parts because God is non-corporeal, and more than this, for all theists, God cannot have parts because otherwise there would need to be some cause of the unity of the parts and therefore some causal power behind God’s existence. It just depends on how fine grained our definitions become – do we include metaphysical and logical parts or not?

For the Classical Theist and Aquinas in particular, God is free from the composition of potency-act and matter-form. God has no potential, his existence is his essence, and he is not composed of substance and accidents or properties. Therefore, God is being itself (ipsum esse) and he is pure actuality (actus purus).^[23]

The Classical Theist position is therefore that God is in himself essentially and personally, absolutely and eternally perfect. This formulation of the doctrine is strongly upheld by the Reformed tradition, both doctrinally and exegetically. Francis Cheynell for example, one of the Westminster divines, in following the Great Tradition connects the doctrine that God is actus purus and divine simplicity with his exegesis of the burning bush passage in Exodus 3:14.^[24]

So far, I have assumed that there is a direct entailment from simplicity to immutability to impassibility. But it is more nuanced than this, and the complexity is in part produced by the lack of consistent definitions in the secondary literature. Additionally, some theologians would seek to modify the definitions in order to uphold Classical Theism but in a qualified sense. John S. Fienberg^[25] for example discusses the distinctions between divine aseity, sovereignty, immutability and simplicity. He affirms the first two but abandons the historic doctrine of simplicity that we have outlined, on the basis of his reading of Scripture and his own metaphysical commitments. In the next section we will see more and more examples of contemporary evangelicals moving away from the historic Reformed doctrine of God.

Impassibility serves well to highlight the confusions and various definitions. The entailment from divine simplicity is generally accepted in the literature on the subject but impassibility is variously applied to God’s will, his knowledge and his emotion. When considered like this, immutability neither implies, nor is implied by impassibility but for strange reasons. One can conceive of a being that cannot suffer but can change if such a being could change itself but was immune to external causal influence. On the other side, one can conceive of a being that is changelessly grieved by sin in his emotions and is thereby immutable and passible. The second scenario is a little weaker because it would still require the first external influence of sin on the being and this would prevent immutability from obtaining in the first instance.

Richard Creel has done much valuable work to draw attention to the complexities of the doctrinal relations between simplicity, immutability and impassibility. He derives eight different definitions of impasibility from the literature and finds that the most common definition is that “impassibility is imperviousness to causal influence from external factors.”^[26] He also suggests that some theologians may claim that God could choose to become impassible, having not previously been so impervious.

Creel applies his general definition of impassibility to God’s nature, will, knowledge and feeling. He designates the four as either passible or impassible and produces a table describing all possible permutations of divine impassibility. The summary is that “It should be clear now that the question with which we are concerned does not come down to a choice between two simple alternatives: Is God passible or impassible? It comes down to a choice among sixteen permutations.”^[27]  As we have seen, the historic orthodox position has been that God is impassible in all four of these areas. The historic orthodox and Thomistic definitions of divine simplicity require that God be impassible in nature, will, knowledge, and feeling. Once this is established, the examples of non-entailment are removed, and it is logically clear that God is simple and therefore immutable and therefore impassible.

Before we move to discuss the trend towards divine passibility, I want to spend a little time examining the way that the church has historically applied and used the doctrine of divine impassibility in various polemical contexts in the second, third and fourth centuries. Gavrilyuk, who wrote the parable we noted at the beginning, charts three heresies across three centuries that were opposed by the orthodox doctrine of divine impassibility.

In the second century the Docetists, because of their assumption that suffering is improper to the divine nature, claimed that the divine Christ only appeared to suffer. The heresy was condemned by the church, particularly in the writings of Ignatius of Antioch and Irenaeus of Lyon, who argued that although the divine nature cannot suffer, by the hypostatic union, the God man Jesus Christ truly suffered for us and as one of us. The opponents of Docetism strongly upheld divine impassibility and indeed used it to uphold orthodoxy against Docetism.

Into the third century we begin to see the heresy of Modalistic Patripassionism. It is really a conjunction of two Trinitarian heresies. Modalism claims that the one God sometimes exists and acts in the mode of the Father, sometimes as the Son and sometimes as the Spirit, depending on the situation and our perception of God. Patripassionism claims that at the cross, God the Father also suffers in the suffering of the Son. When the cross is understood according to the heresy of Modalism, Patripassionism automatically follows because the single divine person suffers at the cross and therefore God suffers. If there is no Triune distinction of persons, one must conclude that God suffers, hence Modalistic Patripassionism. The heresy falls into the opposite error from Docetism because it fails to uphold divine impassibility and thereby diminishes divine transcendence.

Then in the fourth century, following the Council of Nicaea 325, the heresy of Arianism was again condemned, in part by upholding the orthodoxy of divine impassibility because the divine Son, in the incarnation, assumes individuated human nature^[28] to himself.^[29]

The Trend Towards Divine Passibility

In the introduction I noted several writers from Kafka to Solzhenitsyn who asserted that only a God who suffers can bring us any comfort in the face of the terrors of human suffering. Now that we have outlined the historic orthodox doctrine, we can explore the departure from orthodoxy from the end of the nineteenth century to the present in wider Protestantism and particularly in contemporary evangelicalism.

Between the two great wars of the twentieth century, B. R. Brasnett, author of The Suffering of the Impassible God, claimed, “Men feel, and perhaps will feel increasingly, that a God who is not passible, who is exempt from pain or suffering, is a God of little value to a suffering humanity.^[30] This summarises the root of the passibilist turn from the end of the nineteenth century, a turn which, until recently, has led theologians to mock Classical Theism.

In most works of contemporary theology, the primary cause of the turn is greater human suffering accompanied by greater public awareness from the time of the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 to the two great wars in the last century. But this does not do justice to the deep philosophical currents emanating from Hegel’s absolute idealism and his conception of God as becoming. We will return to this after briefly exploring Moltmann and his legacy.

The late theologian Jürgen Moltmann, comments on E. Weisel’s famous account of a prolonged hanging at Auschwitz.^[31] Weisel, who observed the horror, recalls the question, “where is God?” To which the answer was given, “He is here, He is hanging there on the gallows.” In The Crucified God, Moltmann remarks:

Any other answer would be blasphemy. There cannot be any other Christian answer to the question of this torment. To speak here of a God who could not suffer would make God a demon. To speak here of an absolute God would make God an annihilating nothingness. To speak here of an indifferent God would condemn men to indifference.^[32]

Throughout his many writings Moltmann emphasises this same point,^[33] but beneath his rhetoric lies the false assumption that the impassible God of Classical Theism must be inert and indifferent and without compassion for human suffering. Moltmann repeatedly articulates the human desire for a suffering God while others like Solzhenitsyn or Dostoevsky only implicitly affirm.

Moltmann is probably the most well known of the passibilist theologians, but his influences, less traced in contemporary theology, are found primarily in Luther and Hegel. The former supposedly provided the Protestant framework and the latter the philosophical underpinnings and recentralised a form of Trinitarian theology within Protestantism. For Luther, and I admit that this is a vast oversimplification, God suffers as God at the cross because Luther affirms the communicatio naturarum, whereby predicates apt of one of Christ’s natures in the hypostatic union, are transferable to the other nature.

But to make sense of Hegel we must first go back to Immanuel Kant and his critique of metaphysics in the eighteenth century. During the eighteenth century, the doctrine of the Trinity was relatively marginalised in rationalist theology and pietism and this is primarily traceable to Kant. In the “Transcendental Deduction” of the Critique of Pure Reason he sets out his notion that an individual is aware of representations in sense perception as a unified field of consciousness (in other words, I am aware of all these perceptions in a unified way, they are all my perceptions). Kant calls this the “transcendental unity of apperception,” and from it he argues that every possible human judgement is restricted to a framework of twelve categories which he describes as pure, a priori concepts of the faculty of understanding.^[34] From Kant’s Inaugural Dissertation^[35] of 1770 onwards, the deduction of these twelve categories^[36] is central to his critical project. It is important to see that the categories are not Cartesian innate ideas with content, nor are they the concepts of Berkley’s empiricism. The purpose of the categories is to provide an exhaustive inventory of the highest genera under which all entities of human cognition and knowledge can be subsumed. The vital upshot is that because the categories frame all possible knowledge and are based on sense perception, human knowledge is thereby limited to what we can know through our senses. Kant goes on to argue in the Critique of Pure Reason that when we try, in metaphysics or theology, to acquire knowledge beyond sense perception, we automatically fall prey to fallacies which he describes as paralogisms, amphibolies and antinomies. From Kant’s destructive critique and severe restriction of metaphysics and theology, the obvious implications for our knowledge of God are set out in Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone,^[37] where he argues that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is incomprehensible and unpractical. He also denies the relevance of the historicity of Jesus Christ and the doctrine of the atonement. In The Conflict of the Faculties Kant writes that the doctrine of the Trinity “has no practical relevance at all, even if we think we understand it; and it is even more clearly irrelevant if we realise that it transcends all our concepts.”^[38] From these brief quotes and the background in the Critique it is difficult to overestimate the impact of Kantian epistemology and ontology on modern theology, most apparently in the move away from Trinitarian theology and towards historicism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries exemplified in the writings of Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack and Ernst Troeltsch.^[39]

Kant’s transcendental or subjective idealism is developed by Hegel into an absolute or objective idealism in which a modalist form of Trinitarian theology is recentralised because Hegel sought to provide a critical foundation for metaphysics. Hegel claims that all of nature is moving toward a goal. He speaks of the absolute – often synonymous with God – as that which does not depend on anything but moves from unity to otherness to integration. This is Hegel’s architechtonic across his philosophy, from history to politics to Trinitarian theology and therefore the absolute, or the personal God, is the goal of Hegel’s philosophy. The ideas are most clearly (although in Hegel’s philosophy everything is obscure!) expressed in Hegel’s Lectures in the Philosophy of Religion, and Phenomenology of Spirit. It is in these texts that Hegel rejects Kant’s epistemology and from there also to reject divine simplicity and impassibility in Classical Theism. Particularly, Hegel claims that God is not pure actuality but that he, as the absolute, moves towards his creation. There are some clues that as early as 1799 or possibly 1803, Hegel was considering bringing together the triadic syllogism with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.^[40]

Hegel called Christianity “The Consummate Religion”^[41] because in it the concept of religion has become objective to itself, although he seems to view the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation as metaphorical. As we have said, he coordinates the syllogism with the Trinity in his Lectures, the Phenomenology of Spirit and The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate. Here is the Hegelian syllogism:

Premise one: Universality (Allgemeinheit). God in and for itself before creation.
Premise two: Particularity (Besonderheit). God creating the world as other and outside God.
Conclusion: Singularity (Einzelheit). God reconciled the world to himself. ^[42]

In discussing the incarnation, Hegel quotes a Lutheran hymn (he was himself a nominal Lutheran) as he asserts that “God himself is dead.” Hegel expounds the line, not in the Nietzschean sense, but with the claim that at the cross, death, finitude and the negativity became moments in God himself. “Death itself is this negative, the furthest extreme to which humanity as natural existence is exposed; God himself is [involved in] this.”^[43] Again in the Phenomenology he writes “The death of the divine man, as death, is abstract negativity, the immediate result of the movement which ends only in natural universality.”^[44] It is only because of Hegel’s modalistic Trinitarian theology that he is able to argue for the reintegration of the other into the Absolute, into God, and therefore for death and negativity itself to become a moment in the divine life. But Hegel’s notion of divine possibility and becoming is the only way that God can be a saving God in the face of human suffering.

The influence of Hegel on theologians like Moltmann, and Moltmann’s influence on contemporary Protestant and evangelical theology should, by now be very clear and yet very few contemporary evangelicals note Hegel’s philosophy in discussing divine impassibility. Richard Muller,^[45] Richard Creel,^[46] Rob Lister^[47] and the editors of the recent work, Confessing the Impassible God,^[48] all fail to mention Hegel’s influence in any detail, and often even in passing. On the other hand, Hegel is cited much more frequently by Protestant theologians influenced by Pannenberg, Moltmann, Jüngel and Rahner.

For Moltmann, his dependence on Hegel is clearest in his Trinitarian theology of the cross, which cuts against the Patristic, Scholastic and Reformed traditions.^[49] In The Crucified God, he asserts:

If one describes the life of God within the Trinity as the history of God (Hegel), this history of God contains within itself the whole abyss of godforsakenness, absolute death and the non-God. . . Because this death took place in the history between Father and Son on the cross on Golgotha . . . The concrete “history of God” in the death of Jesus on the cross on Golgotha therefore contains within itself all the depths and abysses of human history and therefore can be understood as the history of history. All human history, however much it may be determined by guilt and death, is taken up into this history of God, i.e. into the Trinity, and integrated into the future of the history of God. There is no suffering which in this history of God is not God’s suffering; no death which has not been God’s death in the history on Golgotha.^[50]

The influence of Hegel is explicit and Moltmann’s articulation more fully embraces the paradox, adding a stronger twentieth century flavour. In The Trinity and the Kingdom of God,^[51] and History and the Triune God, Moltmann further develops these themes. The adoptions of Hegelian Idealism into liberal German theology began long before Moltmann, but it was Moltmann who most powerfully and prodigiously brought it to public attention in the starkest and most galvanising language. Before him though, in 1883, Isaac August Dorner wrote Divine Impassibility: A Critical Reconsideration.^[52] Writing between the Industrial Revolution and the First World War, he sought to synthesise Schleiermacher and Hegel as a response to and partial rejection of Classical Theism. His writings also respond to the Kenotic Christological debates of his time and ours.

Since the work of Dorner, Mozley and Moltmann, among many others, and until very recently, the denial of Classical Theism and divine impassibility has increased exponentially in popularity. In 2015, Brandon F Smith and James M. Reniham wrote:

For the better part of the last two centuries the orthodox consensus has been slowly eroding, to the point that, as it stands today, this particular doctrine is a byword for archaic and mistaken theology in both academic and ecclesiastical circles.^[53]

But in the last decade, Classical Theism has seen something of a renaissance^[54] and resurgence in popularity in Protestantism and this conference is a wonderful example!

We have seen the power of Hegel’s influence on the trend towards divine possibility and before moving on to the next section, a certain historical irony should be appreciated. Since Hegel’s death in 1831, our optimistic faith in human progress which so characterised Hegel’s outlook, has been obliterated – Tolstoy^[55] and T.S. Eliot^[56] are fine examples. The process, driven by our inhumanity in the last century and the compartmentalisation that accelerated in the post war years, has ruined the prospect of the Hegelian ideals and his progressive historicism has become untenable. It was the Protestant adoption of Hegel that flowed into the affirmation of divine impassibility, and yet it is precisely the human suffering – which led to the theological shift – that can no longer be supported by Hegel. Put more starkly, the philosophical foundations of passibilism are no longer defensible. This irony now drives us to the foundations of any systematic account of suffering, divine or human: the word of God, the Scriptures.

Scriptural Considerations

My intention in this shorter section is not to set out a comprehensive analysis of the Scriptural teaching on divine impassibility, that has been done many times and very well elsewhere. Instead, I want, at the outset, to acknowledge that there are many passages in God’s word that are easily interpreted as depicting a suffering, changing, sometimes even finite and anthropomorphised God. But there are also many passages – like Exodus 3:14 or Titus 1:2 – that deny such a description of God. Some of the strongest contrasts are seen in the minor prophets – compare, for example Malachi 3:1 with Hosea 11:8-9. We see the contrast of attributes most pressingly in the famous passage in 1 Samuel 15 where we read in verses 11 and 29 that the Lord does change his mind and that he cannot change his mind.^[57]

The disparity within Scripture, even within a single chapter is, in my view, entirely deliberate and intended by the divine author. Maximus the Confessor calls them stumbling blocks – apparent contradictions that force the church to wrestle with the word to understand the deep things of God. Essentially, when reading the diverse descriptions of God in the Bible, we must assess the relative weight of each set of verses and then conclude which set qualifies the other. In other words, are the impassibilist texts subservient to and qualified by the passibilist texts or is it the other way round? Or is there some middle ground, the route taken by some neo-Classical Theists like William Lane Craig, Ryan Mullens, Vern S. Poythress, John Frame and Fienberg, whereby there is a mutual qualification between the sets of texts? The latter options tends not to work out consistently in my view, mainly because we cannot say that the divine nature both does and does not suffer in the same way and at the same time – such language is only possible when applied to the Son in the incarnation by virtue of the hypostatic union and the Catholic and Reformed interpretation of the communication of idioms.

Again, we do not have space here to discuss all these texts and reach an exegetical conclusion on the weight of each passage, and as we’ve said, this has been done extensively elsewhere. Instead, I submit, as we established in the previous sections of this paper, that the consensus of the Church across the ages, from the earliest Patristic texts through the Scholastic era, into Reformed Orthodoxy, has been emphatically that the Scriptures teach that God is impassible and immutable. If we take seriously the Lord’s promise to lead his church into all truth (John 14:16-26), we must then also take seriously the near universal affirmation across the ages of the New Testament Church that God is simple, immutable, impassible and timeless. Classical Theism is, I argue, taught in Scripture, and from there it has been taught by the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. It is at the heart of historic orthodoxy.

Augustine of Hippo writes, in accordance with the Patristic voice, that the doctrine of divine impassibility does not preclude divine affections, but that such affections are qualified by divine impassibility.^[58] Gavrilyuk summarises with the statement that divine impassibility serves as an apophatic qualifier of divine emotions referenced in Scripture.^[59] Apophatic theology, endorsed throughout orthodoxy, holds that one must reach the doctrine of God through a series of denials, the via negativa. Thus, the divine affections are unlike our own, they are compatible with divine impassibility, the doctrine which qualifies them. In other words, the set of verses that uphold Classical theism must be the lens through which one interprets the anthropomorphic and anthropopathic set of verses.

Why Does It Matter?

I want to close this paper with a set of questions. Why does it matter whether or not God is impassible, whether or not Classical Theism obtains? And what is lost when divine impassibility is denied or minimised? The questions all go together, as should be clear by this stage in the argument. To answer them briefly, I will first set out some strong pastoral benefits of Classical Theism and then sketch the rudiments of an impassibilist theodicy.

The Lord tells us in his word (Exod 3:14) that he exists in such a way that his very name, YHWH, which signifies his essence, is to exist. He cannot therefore not exist, otherwise during his existence he would not be truly God as he says he is. Further, his nature is such that what he says cannot be false (Titus 1:2) and he is incapable of lying. Neither can he be unfaithful (2 Tim 2:13), to be such would again contradict his ever blessed nature which is love itself is faithfulness itself, is wisdom itself and goodness itself. On such an overwhelmingly sure foundation our salvation rests. To borrow the words of the Heidelberg Catechism, I can think of no greater comfort in life or death than to know that I, body and soul, belong to such a Lord and Saviour.

To adopt some form of Barthian Neo-Classical Theism, or even to embrace divine passibility, in which God elects to be faithful but presumably could be otherwise, presents the sinner with no solid hope. Or perhaps if God could – even only hypothetically – fail to keep his promises, for example, in the face of overwhelming evil such that a suffering God were to be as helpless as we are, then again, we are given no real, lasting hope. Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously etched on the wall of his cell words that mirror the Gulag poet Silin, “Only a suffering God can help.”^[60] But again we have seen that a suffering God cannot help, he is, like us, helpless in the face of suffering, and no judgement, no justification and condemnation can even finally prevail over such suffering.

What is at stake in considering Classical Theism? Even our eternal salvation. Only the impassible God can help, only the God who is incapable of suffering as God, who is immune to external causal influence, who cannot change and who is simple – without body, parts or passions. Only this God can help, because as Hebrews 2:14-18 teaches, this God, in the person of the Son, took on human nature in the incarnation. God the Son incarnate, the Lord Jesus Christ, suffered and died for us and for our salvation. This is historic pro-Nicene orthodoxy.^[61] When the contrite sinner repents and trusts in the Lord God, the Almighty, he can know with certainty that he will be forgiven.

Footnotes

^[2]  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Volume 3, trans. Harry Willetts (London: Harper Perrenial, 2007), 107.

^[3]  Franz kafka, Metamorphosis, trans. Michael Hofmann (UK: Penguin Classics, 2007), 1.

^[4]  Kafka, Metamorphosis, 55-56.

^[5]  Kafka, Metamorphosis, 68.

^[6]  Fyodore Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (UK: Rabdin Giysem 1992), Books Five and Six.

^[7]  Cited in Letham, Trinity, 303.

^[8] Paul Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 10.

^[9] Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God, 10.

^[10]  Gregory Thaumaturgus, Ad Theopompum. In St. Gregory Thaumaturgus: Life and Works, trans. Michael Slusser (Washington: Catholic University of America, 1998).

^[11]  Lactantius, De Ira Dei, in Lactantius: The Minor Works, trans Mary Fancis McDOnald (Washington: Catholic University of America), 1965.

^[12]  Origen, Homiliae in Ezechielem 6.6, 185-254.

^[13]  Origen, On First Principles (U.S.A.: Ave Maria Press, 2013), Book I, Chapter I, 6. Contemporary passibilist theologians, intending to claim historical precedents for passibilism, occasionally note apparently passibilist texts in Origen, without taking the context of his other writings into account.

^[14]  Denzinger, Enchiridion, Leo’s Tome, 105. Translated: “God, incapable of suffering, of inviolable nature.”

^[15]  Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, quoted in Christopher Tomaszewski, “How the Absolutely Simple Creator Escapes a Modal Collapse,” in Classical, 235.

^[16] James E. Dolezal, All That Is in God: Evangelical Theology and the Challenge of Classical Christian Theism (Reformation Heritage Books, 2017), 41.

^[17]  Hilary of Poitiers, De Trinitate, Book VII, 27. Cited in Christopher Tomaszewski, CT 234.

^[18]  Westminster Confession of Faith (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1969), Chapter II. I.

^[19]  Manfred Svensson and David VanDrunen, ed., Aquinas Among the Protestants (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2018), provides an overview of the Protestant reception of Aquinas. An Evangelical and distinctly Van Tillian critique of Aquinas’ thought and writings can be found in K. Scott Oliphint, Thomas Aquinas (New Jersey: P&R, 2017). Oliphint focuses on epistemology and the existence of God. The work is strongly critiqued within the Reformed tradition by Richard A. Muller, “Aquinas Reconsidered,” review of Thomas Aquinas, by K. Scott Oliphint, Reformation21, February 19, 2018. Westminster Confession of Faith (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1969), Chapter 2.

^[20]  Aquinas, ST, I, q. 3.

^[21]  Aquinas unpacks  non-composition in God in Question 3 in terms of non-corporeality, matter and form, composition of quiddity, essence and nature, subject and accident, genus and difference, composition with other things. ST I, q. 3.

^[22]  Duns Scotus, Philosophical Writings, trans. Allan Wolter (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1987), 88. See also, Cross, Scotus, 96-99.

^[23]  Aquinas, Compendium, 1.9; 1.11; ST I. Q. 9, a. 1, 2.

^[24]  Francis Cheynell, The Divine Triunity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (London: T. R. and E. M., 1650), 8-9. In God Without Passions: A Reader, ed. Samuel Renihan (Palmdale: RBAP, 2015), 159, Duby contends that although modern exegetes tend to restrict the meaning of the divine name in Exodus 3:14 to the Lord’s relationship with Israel, pre-modern writers such as Hilary of Poitiers, Augustine and the Damascene, see in it God’s “eternal plenitude,” and his necessary existence. Duby, Jesus, 16.

^[25]  John S. Feinberg, No One Like Him: The Doctrine of God (Illinois: Crossway, 2006), 277-337.

^[26]  Creel, Impassibility, 11.

^[27]  Creel, Impassibility, 12.

^[28]  I use the phrase “individuated human nature” deliberately. For more detailed discussion of this aspect of the incarnation, see Brand, Intimately, 34-40.

^[29]  Gavrilyuk, Suffering, summary on 17.

^[30]  B. R. Brasnett, The Suffering of the Impassible God (London: SPCK, 1928), ix.

^[31]  E. Weisel, Night (London: Fontana/Collins, 1972), 76-77.

^[32]  Moltmann, Crucified, 283.

^[33]  Cf. Moltmann, History, 29; Moltmann, Trinity, 47.

^[34]  In the Metaphysical and Transcendental Deductions of the first Critique, Kant defines the categories as pure, a priori concepts of the faculty of the understanding. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1996), A79/B106.

^[35]  Immanuel Kant, On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World [Inaugural Dissertation], Cambridge Edition I, Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770, trans. and ed. David Walford in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

^[36]  For those interested in the detail, Kant gives twelve categories listed under four headings which are derived from the forms of judgement. Categories of Quantity: Totality, Plurality, Unity; Categories of Quality: Reality, Negation, Limitation; Categories of Relation: Substance, Causality, Community; Categories of Modality: Possibility, Existence, Necessity. Kant’s categories of Modality concern the attitude of the epistemic agent towards the content of judgements. Kant, Critique, A74/B100.

^[37]  Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (San Francisco, Harper Torchbooks, 1960).

^[38]  Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 66.

^[39]  For analysis of this aspect of Kant’s influence on theology, and the idealist underpinnings, see Gary Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 315-366.

^[40]  O’Regan, Handbook, 257. Beiser, Hegel, 12-13, 145.

^[41]  G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), vii.

^[42]  Hegel, Lectures, 415-416. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 325, 465, 525. G. W. F. Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate, section 4.

^[43]  Hegel, Lectures, 468. Cf. Hegel, Spirit, 475-476.

^[44]  Hegel, Phenomenology,475.

^[45]  Richard A. Muller, Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 3 (Michigan: Baker Academic, 2003). Muller does not refer to Hegel in this volume. Although Hegel’s lifetime does not fall within the post Reformation period, which is the focus of Muller’s work, Muller frequently cites significant philosophers and theologians outside the post Reformation era.

^[46]  Richard Creel, Divine Impassibility (Origen: Wipf &Stick, 2005). Creel gives one footnote reference to Hegel.

^[47]   Rob Lister, God is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion (England: IVP, 2012). Lister does not cite Hegel’s works in the bibliography, although there are two references in the text, at 126, footnote 16, and 145.

^[48]  Confessing, eds. Baines, et al.. Hegel is not cited in the text or the bibliography.

^[49]  My recent work covers this question in detail. Brand, Intimately Forsaken.

^[50]  Moltmann, Crucified, 255.

^[51]  Moltmann, Trinity, 17, 36.

^[52]  Isaak August Dorner, Divine Immutability: A Critical Reconsideration, trans. Robert R. Williams and Claude Welch (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994). Dorner’s Trinitarian theology, following Hegel, tends towards modalism with his language of “absolute personality” applied to the Godhead.

^[53]  Confessing the Impassible God: The Biblical, Classical, & Confessional Doctrine of Divine Impassibility, eds. Ronald S. Baines, Richard C. Barcellos, James P. Butler, Stefan T. Lindblad and James M. Renihan (Palmdale, RBAP, 2015), 253. Cf. Jung young Lee, A Systematic Inquiry in a Concept of Divine Passibility (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 1.

^[54]  Bruce L. McCormack lists several more recent proponents of divine impassibility and claims that the doctrine has made a comeback “with a vengeance.” Bruce McCormack, The Humility of the Eternal Son: Reformed Kenoticism and the Repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 3. I would add the following more recent publications to McCormack’s list: Thomas Joseph White, The Trinity: On the Nature and Mystery of the One God (Washington: Catholic University of America, 2022); Steven J. Duby, Jesus and the God of Classical Theism: Biblical Christology in Light of the Doctrine of God (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2022); Glenn Butner, Trinitarian Dogmatics: Exploring the Grammar of the Christian Doctrine of God (Michigan: Baker, 2022); Classical Theism: New Essays on the Metaphysics of God, eds. Jonathan Fuqua and Robert C. Koons (London: Routledge, 2023); and Brand, Intimately Forsaken.

^[55]  Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: The Modern Library), Part Eleven, Chapter I.

^[56]  T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), See particularly Burnt Norton.

^[57]  The opposing statements about God in Scripture in relation to divine immutability and impassibility are numerous. God is also said to repent in Genesis 6:5-7; Exodus 32:12-14; Deuteronomy 32:36; Judges 2:18. But he is said to be incapable of repentance and changing his mind in Numbers 23:19; Psalm 102:26-27; Hosea 13:14 James 1:7; Hebrews 6:17. 

^[58]  Augustine of Hippo, De Civitate Dei, 14.7.

^[59]  Gavrilyuk, Impassible, Chapter 2, This section of my paper implies many questions and makes many assumptions about the error of Adolf Von Harnack’s Hellenisation Thesis. The thesis is shown to be historically inaccurate by Gavrilyuk in Chapter 1. See also Lewis Ayres, Christological Hellenism: A Melancholy Proposal (Marquette University Press, 2024). I consider Harnack’s thesis to be sufficiently disproven elsewhere to address it in more detail in this paper.

^[60]  Cited in Letham, Trinity, 303.

^[61]  Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), 236.