Towards the end of last year and the beginning of this year, I for the first time truly encountered the doctrine of the impassibility of God and the rest of the implications of classical theism (it always delighted me that the doctrines of classical theism such as simplicity, impassibility, etc. necessarily imply one another). I read James Dolezal's "All That Is In God" in an effort to understand his position and at first with a rather critical intent, as I was (and still am) a huge reader of John Frame and I knew that Frame and Dolezal disagreed on this matter, but I did not have enough understanding of theology proper to make an informed decision between the two. Dolezal's book managed to dissuade me from Frame's side and made me completely change my mind. I feel like this was so long ago, as I've immersed myself in orthodox theology proper ever since that it feels like I've always known the classical doctrine of God, but I know that it was not always this way. I had somehow never even thought in-depth about questions pertaining to theology proper, and this of course, after learning about the divine nature, led me to questions concerning Christology and how the divine Son had taken into union with Himself a human nature, which of course led to questions concerning the atonement. I have had numerous and insanely in-depth studies since November of 2020 that really led me to entirely retrace the doctrinal development in the history of the Church from Nicaea to Chalcedon to the Reformation in just a one-year period. Needless to say, it's the most and fastest I've learned since the year I was first saved at 12 years old.
My concern in this post, however, is not to explain theology, but to recount my own struggle with accepting the doctrine of God's impassibility. Once I had understood that what Dolezal was saying was certainly correct (even though I did not fully understand the doctrine yet), I actually became deeply distressed with the thought that God did not (indeed could not) have even self-willed passions. Looking back now, it seems silly and very strange that anyone would want to subject God to passions, but I wanted God to have emotions towards me. I did not understand how I could relate to someone who could not be changed by any of my actions. I thought that the fact that there was no give-and-take with God meant that I really had no relation to Him at all. I became concerned that God could not even know that I actually existed. I thought that a passionless God could not love me. Around this time, I also began to have doubts about my salvation for the first time in my life, so this created a spiritual and theological crisis that I have never had anything even comparable to.
Though I knew that the classical conception of God was true, I did want it to be. I could not understand how I could relate to a Being who was so different from me. I did not think that I could possibly ever love a God who was impassible. How could I ever even desire to relate to a Being who was so utterly unlike me?
I saw then that all of His attractiveness to me lay in the fact that He was utterly unlike me.
I remember the thought first coming to my mind, one of the most beautiful and life-changing thoughts that I had ever had, that I was abnormal, and God was actually the most normal Being, indeed he is actually the only true Being. The way that I first expressed it to myself was that God is more real than I am. I realized that He is existence itself; that God is normative and that man is derivative. I realized then that I had been thinking about everything completely backward. As Augustine said, "Yet I preferred to think you mutable rather than hold that I was not what you are", I realized that I had made myself the standard and then judged God by man rather than making God the standard and judging man by God.
I remember a section in Matthew Barrett's book on God's attributes that was titled, "Do We Really Want a God Who Suffers? The House Is on Fire", sticking with me because there he used the analogy of a fireman who goes into a burning building to save someone, and states, "Let's be honest, in that moment we do not want someone who changes emotionally or suffers emotional change. We desperately need someone who is impassible".
I saw then that not only was a God who could not change more necessary to a weak and hurting soul like mine but that this also meant that God was maximally alive. He is, was, and will always be (for He only is) an infinite ocean of happiness, never subject to any rising or falling because He is always and eternally the only blessed God. His happiness is not only more complete than ours, but it is of a different quality, because it is divine and infinite, which we can never be.
Finally, I understood that in the fact that His love towards me existed always in a higher and immutable plane, this did nothing to diminish His concern for me, but only ensured that it was an infinite and Divine concern far above even the greatest and most perfect love that imaged creatures are capable of. The Creator-creature distinction ensures true analogy between the Archetypal Divine and the echtypal creature, but the same mistake that those who wish to conceive of God as mutable all make is that they prefer the imaged finite to the original infinite.
Nor do I intend to diminish creaturely love when I say these things, but I only wish for it to be recognized that creaturely love is by definition creaturely and is therefore finite; but it was always intended to be, indeed it could not be otherwise, for this is all that it is even capable of because the most fundamental truth of theology remains the fact that the finite cannot contain the infinite.
So, we see that in the final assessment of things that those like Moltmann who, no doubt out of a desire to create a God they feel can truly love humanity, have ironically reduced God's love, not by a little, but by an actually infinite amount.
It is only through the recognition that "in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" does one realize that God, in all that He is (and all that He is, is Him), is far above all created things in our experience and is not different from us solely in degree, but in quality.
It is this distinction between God and the creature, that, as the foundation for all proper reasoning about God and man, was the first truth to be violated by Satan himself. It was the desire to become like God, a thing utterly impossible for all creatures by definitional necessity, that first plunged Adam and Eve into sin when they believed this lie; and thus our reasoning has been corrupted ever since this original and most abominable lie, because the source and essence of all insanity and of all lunacy is the belief that as God is, so man could be.
And so, God is cheated when we make Him any less than impassible. We are merely repeating the original sin in our theology when we do such things. All of theology flows out of avoiding the same mistake that Adam and Eve made. If we can distinguish the Creator from the creature, then we may have a true theology proper, and thus a true anthropology, and thus a true Christology, and thus a true soteriology; but if we fail where our first parents did, then our theology will only ever amount to their own insanity.
We must give God his proper place. And when we do so, we will find that His proper place is not only better, but infinitely more so than any place that we, in our sinful autonomy, would have placed Him.
An unchanging God is the only God who can offer us hope. The immutability of God ensures that our faith may be confidently placed in our Rock, as Christians have done throughout the centuries. Not only could God not change even if He wanted to, but the doctrine of God's impassibility tells that we shouldn't even desire Him to, for He is absolutely perfect and complete as He is. His joy in Himself is boundless and most glorious. The intra-Trinitarian delight between the Father, Son, and Spirit is a communion so perfect and wholly satisfying that it gives delight to Christians to even imagine the unparalleled love between the persons of the Godhead. The happiness of God then even gives happiness to His creatures. But a post on the beauty of intra-Trinitarian love is for another time.
The impassibility of God is not only true, but it is infinitely glorious. It provides the most comfort that any man can have; actually, it is the only way that any man may have any comfort at all. It is not the changing god of open theism who has true affection for man, but it is only Him who is pure act who can have divine, transcendent, unending, unchanging, ineffable, and always perfect love for man.
It is only for the man who loves the impassible God, who can say with Geerhardus Vos,
"The best proof that He will never cease to love us lies in that He never began".
O let me then at length be taught, What I am still so slow to learn, That God is love, and changes not, Nor knows the shadow of a turn.
– William Cowper
