On the Impassibility of God

Over at Metacatholic, Doug Chaplin is beginning a series on the 39 articles. It’s a marvelous project, and I look forward to following it.

In his post on the first article, Doug appears to respond (if only between the lines) to my precedent post “My God is an Angry God.”

It has always struck me that ancient Hebrew poetry is awash in descriptions of God’s anger. Classical prophecy, many of the Psalms, the book of Job – they fall apart conceptually if one removes this element from the whole.

It raises the question: is it possible to speak truthfully about God, and do without language that refers to God’s anger? Over the long haul, I'm not sure it is.

One of the great strengths of patristic theology is its “et/et-ness.” For example, the fathers maintained belief in the immortality of the soul, a doctrine with a wide currency in the religious koiné of their environment, and which they saw no reason to abandon. They held no less to belief in Jesus’ bodily resurrection from the dead, and to the hope of the resurrection of the flesh among the “last things” that God will one day accomplish. These last teachings are central to Christianity quite apart from and in advance of the later patristic synthesis.

The fathers sought a synthesis of apparently irreconcilable tenets. In the process, originally unrelated conceptual complexes came in for mutual redefinition. The example given, immortality of the soul and resurrection of the flesh, is one among many.

To be sure, the making of doctrine in all times and places, covertly or overtly, involves redefinition by means of assimilation and appropriation of concepts, motifs, and stimuli external to precedent tradition. The patristic period stands out nonetheless for the intense creativity of the assimilatory process at work therein. Something new came into the world as a result.

From Philo on, to be more exact, the God-talk of the Bible came to be reinterpreted in light of God-talk of (particular versions of) Greek philosophy. Vice-versa, God-talk characteristic of philosophy came to be reinterpreted in light of God-talk in the Bible.

Sometimes the end result was a synthesis which is greater than the sum of its parts. Sometimes the end result looks more like the juxtaposition of elements in unresolved tension. The latter end-result is sometimes to be recommended. It requires humility to allow for the possibility that some conflicts will not be resolved except by eschatological fiat.

In my view, the irrenounceable truth contained in the teaching of the impassibility of God is finely summed up in the current Catholic catechism, paragraph 271:

God’s almighty power is in no way arbitrary: “In God, power, essence, will, intellect, wisdom, and justice are all identical. Nothing therefore can be in God’s power which could not be in his just will or his wise intellect.”

The quotation is from the Summa of Thomas. The original reads thus:

[I]n Deo est idem potentia et essentia et voluntas et intellectus et sapientia et iustitia. Unde nihil potest esse in potentia divina, quod non possit esse in voluntate iusta ipsius, et in intellectu sapiente eius. (STh I, 25, 5, ad 1)

I would translate as follows:

In God, power, being, will, intelligence, wisdom and justice are one and the same, such that nothing can exist by divine power that cannot exist in virtue of the just will of same, and in his sapient intelligence.

Thomas affirms that God can do nothing that is incompatible with his justice, his will, and his wisdom. With the further proviso that God’s will coincides with God’s love – that is, that God’s will, too, is in no way arbitrary - a definition of the impassibility of God adjusted to the biblical witness is in hand. Or so it seems to me.

On this view, the unchanging initiative of God, while autonomous by definition and resolved upon by God in aseity from all else and all others, gives rise nevertheless to a history in which change serves precisely to maintain unchanged the original initiative.

It is truly a case of: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

If this is true, is it helpful to speak of biblical God-talk of divine anger, repentance, and sadness as “metaphors,” that is, as roundabout ways of speaking about a God who is never angry, never repents, and is never sad? I don’t think so.

It is striking that the Catechism speaks of hatred, aversion, fear, and anger in positive, not just negative terms. It is a great modern heresy to think that it is possible not to do so. Part of a larger essay on passions and the moral life, paragraph 1765 notes the following:

The apprehension of evil causes hatred, aversion, and fear of the impending evil; this movement ends in sadness at some present evil, or in the anger that resists it.

Said passions, it must be added, are salutary to the extent that they originate in a right comprehension of justice, love, and wisdom. The Catechism’s paragraphs 1767-1770 speak of these things in remarkably insightful terms.

God, in whom we live and move and have our being, who is justice, love, and wisdom in perfect unity, is a passionate God. Is it possible to carry on the work of synthesis which has always characterized the best theology?  I think it is.

UPDATE: Doug Chaplin responds.