The Suffering of the Impassible God
by Jeff Reimer
Feast of St Proclus, Patriarch of ConstantinopleAnno Domini 2015, November 20
ONE OF THE
best books I’ve read on patristic theology is The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought
by Paul L. Gavrilyuk. The book is a historical study of impassibility, an early Christian doctrine that claims God does not suffer human emotions or feelings.
Gavrilyuk frames his whole argument as an apologetic toward the school of thought that he labels “The Theory of Theology’s Fall Into Hellenistic Philosophy,” which becomes his shorthand for the following:
A standard line of criticism places divine impassibility in the conceptual realm of Hellenistic philosophy, where the term allegedly meant the absence of emotions and indifference to the world, and then concludes that impassibility in this sense cannot be an attribute of the Christian God. In this regard, a popular dichotomy between Hebrew and Greek theological thinking has been elaborated specifically with reference to the issues of divine (im)passibility and (im)mutability. On this reading, the God of the prophets and apostles is the God of pathos, whereas the God of the philosophers is apathetic.
In short, the line of reasoning goes, the Bible depicts a God who suffers; Greek philosophy, one who does not. With this as your starting point, which do you choose? Of course, forced into this dichotomy, you choose the suffering God of the Bible.
Gavrilyuk shows clearly that this theory—that the church fathers imposed some foreign theology onto the New Testament gospel that wasn’t unearthed until the Reformation or the advent of historical-critical exegesis actually—has very little historical warrant. There was simply no consensus about these things even in Hellenistic philosophy. What the church fathers were really doing in their encounters with various forms of heresy, especially in the Sabellian, Docetic, Arian, and Nestorian controversies, was articulating a negative theology, hence the subtitle The Dialectics of Patristic Thought. In other words, they were safeguarding the inexhaustible mystery of the transcendent God. They weren’t capitulating to certain ideas dominant in their society; they were fighting to prevent certain erroneous conceptions of the person of Jesus Christ.
I encountered "The Theory of Theology’s Fall Into Hellenistic Philosophy" in two forms at my evangelical seminary: (1) a New Testament exegesis professor repeatedly told his students to “be careful” reading the church fathers because they uncritically accepted theoretical and metaphysical thought forms foreign to the Bible (and I’ve encountered this caricature dozens of times since, almost always from within the “biblical studies” guild), and (2) an applied theology professor sympathetic to the trinitarian thought of Jürgen Moltmann and Eberhard Jüngel (a few prime suspects, following Harnack, when it comes to Gavrilyuk’s Theory) appropriated their ideas in a very practical way.
So does God suffer? Well, yes and no. Literally. Cyril of Alexandria, who articulated the doctrine in its most fleshed out form, used the formula “the impassible God suffered” in Jesus Christ as his theological crux in his debates with the Nestorians. Any attempt to resolve this paradox ultimately results in heresy.
The answer beyond that is that Jesus Christ suffered in his human nature, but not in his divine nature. His divine nature was involved in the sufferings of Jesus, because Jesus’s human and divine natures were, after all, inseparably joined. But in suffering, Jesus did not merely identify with human suffering but overcame it through his divinity. A God who merely identifies with human suffering isn’t capable of saving us from it.
Moreover, and this is something almost all critics of impassibility miss, Gavrilyuk points out again and again that impassibility does not simply mean God is incapable of all emotions, but is rather incapable of the type of emotions that are not historically defined as “God-befitting,” such as grieving and despair. Otherwise, again, how would he overcome them for our salvation?
It’s been exciting over the past decade to see more and more historical and systematic theologians—Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox—taking on both the assumed fall of Christian theology into some kind of dark age after the New Testament era and the near-consensus among modern systematic theologians and biblical scholars that God suffers in his very being. This book is a pretty focused and dense theological monograph, so I hope these ideas continue to catch on at a more popular level.
224 pp. paper $55.00
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Jeff Reimer
is a freelance editor and writer based in Newton, Kansas.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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