Impassibility

John Peckham devotes a long chapter of his The Love of God to the question of divine emotions, the impassibility question. He emphasizes the need to “maintain the Creator/creature distinction, divine transcendence, ontological invulnerability, omnipotence, omniscience and the fact that God is not involuntarily vulnerable. . . . God is not essentially passible or vulnerable in relation to the world. . . . God need not have created any world, and thus God’s passibility in relation to the world is voluntary, God is not involuntarily vulnerable to the effects of others, ‘manipulated, overwhelmed, or surprised,’ and thus experiences emotions in a manner that is entirely flawless and, in this way and others, differs from humans” (180). 

At the same time, Peckham’s foreconditional-reciprocal model of divine love means that “God’s emotions may be affected by and responsive to creaturely actions that he does not causally determine, many of which (grief, anger) he does not ideally desire, experiencing both positive and negative emotions that are evaluatively responsive to human disposition or action. Accordingly, God is passionate toward humans, delighting in goodness and suffering in response to the actions of creatures, experiencing pain evoked by evil (which God does not causally determine). In all this, God, by freely creating this world, voluntarily opened himself up to being affected by creatures yet remains ontologically free to remove himself from such passible relationship with the world” (180-1). I differ with Peckham about causal determination of human actions, though I agree with him that God is not the cause of sin. 

Peckham’s discussion is perhaps most helpful for the frame he erects for addressing the question of impassibility. It has two dimensions. The first has to do with the priority of Scripture: “The canonical approach employed here . . . gives priority to the canonical language, affirming and using such language as applying to God unless there is a canonically derived rationale not to do so, with the crucial proviso that such language is unavoidably analogical, and thus one must always remain cognizant of the Creator-creature distinction” (176). This is in turn rooted in his conviction that, since the only language we have to use is human language, and therefore all human language about God (even the most supposedly “metaphysically literal”) is “accommodative” (163). I’d use different terms, but I agree with the substance: God speaks human to humans, and He speaks truthfully.

The other parameter is that God is “the omnipotent Creator, ontologically distinct from creation, both transcendent and immanent.” The Creator-creature distinction cuts across everything we say about God.  At the same time, “humans were created in the image of God” and therefore human experience is suitably analogous to the life and character of God.

The impassibility debate will be helpfully resolved only if these two parameters are maintained. If we forget the latter point, we creaturize the Creator, turning Him into an idol. If, as is more common, we forget the former point, we bypass plain Scriptural teaching in favor of a theology proper derived from who-knows-where.