Chapter 28

Divine Emotions and Time

Why a Passible God Must Be Temporal

Introduction: The Strange Idea of a Frozen Heart

Imagine a father watching his daughter drown. The lifeguard is too far away. The father cannot swim. He stands on the shore, and something happens inside him — something that has no name but every name at once. His stomach drops. His breath catches. A cry tears out of him before he knows he is making it. He feels, in that terrible moment, the full weight of what is happening. And then, when she is rescued and pulled dripping and coughing onto the sand, another thing happens inside him. Relief floods in. He sinks to his knees. He laughs, or sobs, or both. His heart, which a moment ago was shattered, begins to mend.

Now imagine a theologian telling you that God is not like this. Not even remotely. That when God seems to respond to our pain, He is not actually responding at all. That when Scripture says God "grieved" over human wickedness in Noah's day, or that Jesus "wept" at Lazarus's tomb, or that the Father "rejoices" over a repenting sinner — none of this represents a real change in God's inner life. God, the theologian tells us, is timelessly and changelessly blessed. His happiness is uninterrupted. His emotional state is fixed in a single, unchanging "eternal now." Whatever the Bible says about God's heart is, at bottom, a figure of speech — a way of accommodating our weak minds to truths we cannot otherwise grasp.

I want to argue in this chapter that this picture cannot be right. Not because I lack appreciation for the classical tradition — I have great respect for the theologians who developed it, and I want to treat their arguments fairly. But because at the very center of the Christian story stands a God who acts out of love, who responds to His people, who hurts when they sin and rejoices when they return. And genuine emotional response, I will argue, is inherently temporal. You cannot genuinely respond to something if you exist outside of time. Response requires a before and an after. Response requires succession. Response requires that something has happened, and that you are now, because of it, in a state you were not in a moment ago.¹

This chapter is the heart, in some ways, of the larger argument of this book. We have already seen, in earlier chapters, that divine timelessness faces serious difficulties when tested against creation (Chapter 6), against the Incarnation (Chapter 27), and against the biblical portrait of God's actions in history (Chapters 17–22). In this chapter, I want to show that timelessness faces yet another decisive problem: it cannot make room for the emotional life of God as the Bible describes it. And since the emotional life of God is not a minor theme in Scripture — it is, I will argue, one of the most frequently attested features of God's character — a doctrine that denies it is in serious trouble.

My thesis can be stated simply: the genuine emotional responsiveness of God — His real love, grief, anger, joy, and compassion in response to creaturely events — requires divine temporality, because genuine emotional response is inherently temporal. A timeless God cannot genuinely respond. And a God who does not genuinely respond is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He is not the Father of Jesus Christ. He is not the Spirit who grieves at our sin. He is, instead, a philosophical idol — a being of our own construction, built to satisfy the demands of a particular metaphysics rather than to reflect the living God of Scripture.

I realize this is a strong claim. Let me lay out the plan for the chapter so you can see where we are going. First, I will briefly locate the argument within the larger context of my companion book, The Heart of God, which makes the full biblical case for divine passibility. Here I will simply summarize the conclusion and build on it. Second, I will present the logical connection between emotion and time — showing why genuine emotional response requires temporal sequence. Third, I will develop Ryan Mullins's powerful "wrath argument," which demonstrates that a timelessly wrathful God faces a serious injustice problem. Fourth, I will present and respond to the classical counter-move, which tries to secure God's emotions "timelessly" and "changelessly." Fifth, I will address a crucial distinction that often gets blurred in these debates: the difference between foreknowledge and experiential response. Knowing that something will happen and experiencing the response to it when it happens are not the same thing. Sixth, I will show how passibility and temporality mutually reinforce each other — so that affirming one virtually requires affirming the other. Finally, I will gather the threads and conclude.

Along the way I will draw extensively on Ryan Mullins's important book God and Emotion, which remains, to my mind, the clearest and most rigorous philosophical treatment of these issues. I will also draw on his End of the Timeless God and David Lamb's The Emotions of God, which provides a wealth of biblical material on God's emotional life. As always, I will try to present the opposing view — classical impassibility — fairly and charitably before offering my response.

Connecting to the Larger Project: The Emotional Life of God

Before we get into the philosophical argument, I need to address something a critical reader will surely raise. The whole argument of this chapter depends on the claim that God really does have genuine emotional responses to creaturely events. If that claim is false — if God's "emotions" in Scripture are all merely figurative, anthropopathic language that does not describe anything in God's actual inner life — then the argument from emotion to temporality never gets off the ground. A timeless God who has no real emotions has no real emotions to respond with, and the whole discussion collapses.

So I need to say a word about why I think God really does have genuine emotional responses. I have made the full case in my companion volume, The Heart of God: Does God Feel? A Biblical and Theological Case for the Emotional Life of God. I do not want to reproduce that entire argument here. But let me sketch the key points so the present chapter can stand on its own feet.

The first point is exegetical. The Bible is saturated with language about God's emotions. David Lamb, in his excellent study The Emotions of God, identifies seven emotions most frequently associated with God in Scripture: hate, anger, jealousy, sorrow, joy, compassion, and love.² Of these, three — wrath, compassion, and love — are attributed to God so frequently that dismissing them as mere figures of speech requires explaining away literally hundreds of passages. Mullins notes that the classical theist who wants to read all of these as anthropopathic must explain away over four hundred passages that would be much more naturally interpreted along passibilist lines.³ That is a lot of Bible to explain away, and it demands very strong philosophical grounds.

But — and this is the second point — the philosophical grounds for explaining them away are themselves weak. The doctrine of divine impassibility did not come from reading the Bible. It came from a set of Greek philosophical assumptions about what a perfect being must be like.⁴ Mullins observes that the New Testament scholar Michael Bird's Evangelical Theology, which is generally careful to ground each doctrine in Scripture, offers no biblical references in support of impassibility — the only divine attribute Bird treats without scriptural citation.⁵ And the passibilist theologian John Peckham has argued at length that the doctrine has no biblical support.⁶ When we weigh hundreds of biblical passages on one side against a philosophical tradition on the other, the biblical evidence ought to be decisive.

The third point is theological. The most important revelation of God's character is Jesus Christ. And Jesus was unmistakably emotional. He wept at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:35). He was moved with compassion when He saw the crowds (Matthew 9:36). He was angry at the hardness of heart He encountered in the synagogue (Mark 3:5). He agonized in Gethsemane (Matthew 26:37–38). He rejoiced in the Holy Spirit (Luke 10:21). If Jesus is the exact representation of the Father (Hebrews 1:3) — if to see Him is to see the Father (John 14:9) — then the emotional life we see in Jesus is not foreign to God. It is a genuine revelation of who God is.

For the purposes of this chapter, I will simply take these points as established. God genuinely has emotions. Those emotions are real responses, not mere figures of speech. If you want the full case for this, I commend The Heart of God. But even readers who are unsure about passibility in its full form should be able to follow the argument of this chapter. Because what I want to show is a kind of conditional: if God has any genuine emotional responses at all — even just one — then God must be temporal. The conclusion follows from a very minimal premise.

Why Emotion and Time Are Inseparable

Let me now present the central logical argument, slowly and carefully. The argument turns on what it means to respond emotionally to something. I want to show that response, properly understood, is unavoidably temporal.

Start with something concrete. Suppose I am walking down the street and I see a child dart out in front of a bus. My heart jumps into my throat. I feel a surge of fear, horror, dread. I am responding, emotionally, to what I am witnessing. Now notice the structure of this experience. There is an event — the child darting into the street. And there is a response — my emotional state of horror. These two things are not the same thing. They are related as cause and effect, as before and after. The event happened, and then, because it happened, I had the response. If you subtract the temporal structure, the whole thing collapses. My horror cannot be the response to the child's danger unless the child's danger precedes the horror in some meaningful sense.

This point may seem so obvious that it is hardly worth saying. But it is exactly what the classical doctrine of divine impassibility wants to deny about God. The classical position is that God has His emotional states timelessly. God is eternally, changelessly wrathful toward sin. God is eternally, changelessly compassionate. God is eternally, changelessly joyful. His emotional life has no before and after, no event-and-then-response structure. It is all "at once," in one timeless, unchanging act.⁷

My claim is that this picture is not coherent as a picture of response. You can perhaps make sense of a being who has certain emotional dispositions timelessly. But you cannot make sense of a being who genuinely responds to particular creaturely events timelessly. Because response requires temporal sequence by its very nature.

Think about this a different way. Consider what it would mean for me to say that I am responding to my daughter's question. If you asked me what I mean by "responding," I would describe it something like this: she asked a question, I heard the question, I thought about it, and now I am saying something back to her because of what she asked. Every part of that description involves a temporal sequence. The question came first. The hearing came next. The thinking came after that. The answer comes now. Remove the sequence, and there is no response. There is just a state of affairs in which there is a question and an answer, both hanging in a timeless void, with no explanation of why the answer is an answer to that particular question.

Now apply this to God. When the Bible says God "grieved that he had made man on the earth" (Genesis 6:6), it is describing a response. Something had happened in creation — human wickedness had grown great — and God had a reaction to it. He grieved. Theologically, this language cannot be accidental. The text is carefully connecting God's emotional state to what was happening in His creation. The grief is about the wickedness. It is because of the wickedness. Remove that connection, and you no longer have what the text is describing.⁸

The classical theist has to say that the connection is not really there — not in any literal sense. God was not actually responding to human wickedness. God was timelessly in some state of affairs that, from our creaturely perspective, looks like a response, but is not really one. The problem is that this dissolves the very thing the text is trying to teach us. The text is trying to teach us that God cares about what happens in the world. That sin genuinely affects Him. That He is not indifferent. If His "grief" is not a real response, then the whole pastoral and theological point of the passage is lost.

Let me put the argument in more formal terms, since some readers will want to see it laid out carefully:

(1) Genuine emotional responses have a before-and-after structure: the event, and then the response to it.

(2) Any being whose inner life has a before-and-after structure is temporal (it experiences real succession).

(3) Therefore, any being that genuinely has emotional responses is temporal.

(4) God genuinely has emotional responses (as established in my companion volume and briefly sketched above).

(5) Therefore, God is temporal.

The argument is valid. And the premises, I submit, are all defensible. Premise (1) is almost a definition of what "emotional response" means. Premise (2) is the mainstream understanding of what temporality involves — indeed, Rory Fox has shown that succession was the fundamental basis in the Middle Ages for determining whether something was temporal or non-temporal.⁹ Premise (4) is the fruit of the biblical case I have sketched above and developed at length in The Heart of God. So the conclusion follows: God is temporal.

Now, a critic might push back on premise (1). Perhaps there is some way to construe "emotional response" that does not require temporal sequence. Perhaps God's "response" is a different kind of thing than a creaturely response. This is essentially what the classical tradition has tried to say. We will get to that objection soon. But notice how much burden the classical theist has to carry: they have to give us a model of "response" that is not really a response in the ordinary sense, and then explain why the biblical language of response should be read in this unusual way rather than in its ordinary sense. That is a tall order.

Mullins's Wrath Argument: A Knockout Blow to Impassibility

At this point I want to present what I consider one of the most powerful arguments in the contemporary literature against divine impassibility. It comes from Ryan Mullins, in section 5.2 of his God and Emotion. Mullins calls it "the problem of divine wrath," and I have come to think of it, informally, as the "knockout argument." Once you see it clearly, it is very hard to see how classical impassibility survives it intact. And since classical impassibility is one of the key pillars supporting divine timelessness, the argument has direct implications for our question about God and time.¹⁰

Let me walk through it slowly. Mullins is looking at the classical theist's claim that God genuinely has the emotion of wrath. This is a widespread classical affirmation — theologians from Tertullian to A. W. Pink have maintained that God literally has wrath.¹¹ Pink goes so far as to say that God cannot be morally perfect without wrath; anyone unwilling to reflect on "God's detestation of sin" does not have a proper attitude toward God's perfections.¹² And Scripture clearly presents God as wrathful. Psalm 7:11 says "God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day." Ephesians 2:3 speaks of those who are "by nature children of wrath." John 3:36 declares that "the wrath of God remains on" those who do not obey the Son. The Bible is full of divine wrath.

So the classical theist — and I mean the traditional classical theist who is committed to strict impassibility — is in a bind. They want to say that God literally has wrath. But they also want to say that God cannot be influenced by anything external to the divine nature. These two claims are in serious tension. Here is why.

Consider what wrath is. Wrath is not a free-floating, objectless state. Wrath is directed at something. It has an object. You cannot just be "wrathful" in the abstract, the way you can be "hungry" in the abstract. Wrath is always toward some specific offense or offender. God's wrath, in Scripture, is wrath against sin, against sinners, against idolatry, against injustice, against oppression. The object of God's wrath is creatures and creaturely actions.¹³

Now the problem becomes sharp. If God's wrath is directed at creatures and their sins, then God's wrath seems to be caused or influenced by creatures and their sins. After all, that is what an object of wrath is: the thing that the wrath is about, the thing that elicits or warrants the wrath. But impassibility insists that nothing external to the divine nature can cause or influence God. And that is a contradiction.

Mullins sets the problem out as a four-premise argument. The argument runs, in substance, like this: first, God genuinely has the emotion of wrath. Second, if creatures cause or influence God's wrath, then God's wrath is dependent on creatures. Third, creatures really do cause or influence God's wrath — otherwise there would be no object for the wrath at all. And therefore, fourth, God's wrath really is dependent on creatures.¹⁴

The first premise is a classical commitment — most classical theists have affirmed it. The second premise is a principle both sides of the debate accept. The third premise is hard to deny: what else could God's wrath be directed at, if not the sins of creatures? And the fourth premise is just the inescapable conclusion, which flatly contradicts the impassibilist claim that God is not dependent on anything external.

The classical theist, faced with this, has essentially three ways out. Each of them, I will argue, is a dead end. Let me walk through them.

Escape Route One: Deny that God Has Wrath

The first option is to deny premise (1). That is, to say that God does not literally have wrath at all. God's "wrath" in Scripture is a figure of speech — an anthropopathic expression that, strictly speaking, does not describe anything in God's inner life.¹⁵

Some patristic theologians took this route. Mullins notes that Clement of Alexandria, Origen, John Cassian, and Augustine all, at various points, denied that God literally experiences wrath; they interpreted divine "wrath" as the subjective human experience of God's love — unrepentant sinners experience God's love as wrath, but wrath is not actually an attribute of God.¹⁶ This move preserves impassibility. God has no genuine emotional response to sin, so God is not dependent on creatures.

But this move faces two serious problems. First, the biblical data is overwhelming. As I noted earlier, Mullins points out that the classical theist who takes this route must explain away over four hundred biblical passages on divine wrath.¹⁷ Psalm 7:11 says God "feels indignation every day." That is not easily dismissed as mere metaphor. The text uses the language of feeling. It specifies daily feeling. These are concrete, particular descriptions of God's emotional life. To explain away all such passages, you need very powerful philosophical grounds. And as I noted earlier, those grounds are not strong.

Second, if divine wrath is merely a metaphor, the classical theist owes us an account of what it is a metaphor for. What is the literal truth about God that "wrath" is pointing to? Marshall Randles, a nineteenth-century theologian, tried to answer this by saying divine "wrath" is really God's satisfaction in condemning sin — His pleasure at the triumph of right over wrong.¹⁸ But notice what happens when you unpack this. Randles ends up saying that God is "actuated" toward offenders. And "actuated" means moved, motivated, acted upon. So even on Randles's reading, God is being moved by creaturely sin to perform certain actions. Which is precisely what impassibility denies. James Dolezal, a contemporary classical theist, puts the point bluntly: "Our sins, be they ever so many, have no effect on God."¹⁹ Randles's interpretation, however much it wants to preserve divine happiness, still has God being causally influenced by creaturely sin to metaphorically "have wrath." So the escape doesn't actually escape the problem.

Escape Route Two: Deny that Creatures Cause God's Wrath

The second option is to deny premise (3). That is, to admit that God has wrath, but insist that creatures are not what cause it. God's wrath comes from somewhere else — from God's own eternal knowledge, perhaps, or from God's own nature.²⁰

Here is how a sophisticated version of this move might go. Perhaps God's wrath is grounded in God's eternal knowledge of certain propositions. Take the proposition "Sally kicks a puppy at time t." God knows this proposition from all eternity. And this eternally-known proposition is what grounds God's wrath toward Sally. So it is not Sally herself who causes God's wrath; it is the proposition about Sally that does the work. And since the classical theist typically holds that propositions exist in the mind of God (the doctrine of divine ideas), the proposition is not really "external" to God.²¹

This is clever. But it runs into a deeper problem. What makes the proposition "Sally kicks a puppy at time t" true? The standard answer is that Sally makes it true. Sally, by actually kicking a puppy at time t, is the truthmaker for that proposition. Most contemporary philosophers of religion who hold to libertarian free will are committed to this claim, because it is what allows divine foreknowledge to coexist with human freedom. Sally is the one who makes it true, not God — which is why God's knowing it doesn't determine her to do it.²²

But now look at what this implies. If Sally is the truthmaker for the proposition, then Sally is what makes God's belief about her sin true. And if God's wrath is grounded in that belief, then God's wrath is, in the last analysis, grounded in Sally. Which means God is, after all, being influenced by creatures. The escape route collapses.

The only way out is to deny that creatures are the truthmakers for these propositions. And that means saying that God is the truthmaker. God determines that Sally kicks the puppy. God determines everything. This is theological determinism, and it is the road to classical Calvinism.²³ Even setting aside the serious problems with theological determinism — the threat to human freedom, the problem of evil, the question of divine responsibility for sin — this move still doesn't save impassibility. Because now God's wrath is grounded in God Himself. God is the proper object of God's wrath. And that is absurd. God is morally perfect; He cannot be the proper object of wrath.²⁴

So the second escape route also fails. Either creatures cause God's wrath (violating impassibility), or God causes everything including Sally's sin (leading to theological determinism, and to God being the object of His own wrath). Neither option is acceptable.

Escape Route Three: The "Happy Wrath" Move

The third option is the most sophisticated, and it deserves careful attention. This is the move associated with W. G. T. Shedd, and it has a long pedigree in classical theology. Mullins, with his characteristic wit, calls it "the happy wrath of God."²⁵

The idea is this. Wrath, properly understood, is a kind of emotional harmony between a moral judgment and its proper object. Wrath is what one feels toward what one rightly judges to be morally evil. And because God perfectly perceives the evil of sin, God timelessly and changelessly has wrath toward sin. But this wrath does not disturb God's blessedness. Because wrath, when properly calibrated to its proper object, is actually a kind of satisfaction. God is satisfied in His moral judgment of sin. So God's wrath and God's happiness are not in conflict. They are two sides of the same coin.²⁶

This is ingenious. And it tries to square the circle by making God's wrath something that exists timelessly in God's nature without requiring any creaturely input. But I think it fails for two reasons.

First, the biblical portrait of divine wrath does not match this description. In Scripture, God's wrath is not a serene, happy state of moral satisfaction. It is agitated, heated, burning, powerful. The Hebrew verbs used for divine anger — charah (to burn), qatsaph (to be provoked), za'am (to be indignant) — all carry connotations of being moved, stirred, agitated.²⁷ Psalm 7:11 says God "feels indignation every day." "Indignation" is not satisfied contemplation. It is disturbance. It is being perturbed by something.

Second, and more importantly, even the "happy wrath" model cannot escape the dependence problem. Mullins drives this home clearly. Shedd's account, when examined carefully, still has the sins of creatures as the object of God's wrath. And whatever is the object of an emotion is, in some real sense, what the emotion is about — and therefore what causes or elicits it. Shedd wants to say that God's wrath is timelessly the same regardless of what creatures do. But if there were no sinning creatures, there would be no object for the wrath. The wrath would have no target. It would not be wrath at all. So creatures are still required to make God's wrath be wrath. Which means the wrath is dependent on them.²⁸

Mullins summarizes the impasse pointedly. He confesses that he sees no good move left for the impassibilist here. It cannot be that God is the object of His own wrath — that is absurd. It cannot be that creatures cause or influence God's wrath — that is what impassibility denies. But the claim that creaturely sin in no way affects God's wrath is, Mullins suggests, one that most theologians would be unwilling to endorse if they saw it clearly. The wrath argument, carefully developed, leaves the classical theist without a good option.²⁹

The Temporality Implication

So far I have presented the wrath argument as an argument against impassibility. How does it connect to the question of God's relationship to time?

The connection is direct and important. In the classical tradition, impassibility and timelessness are not two separate doctrines that happen to be held together. They are tightly linked, mutually entailing components of a single package — what Mullins calls the "divine timeless research program."³⁰ If you reject strict impassibility, you have already taken a long step toward rejecting strict timelessness. Because the reason classical theism holds God to be impassible is precisely that God is timeless. A timeless God cannot undergo emotional change. So if we demonstrate that God does undergo emotional change — that He genuinely responds to what happens in the world — we have demonstrated that God is not timeless in the classical sense.³¹

Let me add an additional consideration that makes the connection even sharper. There is a further injustice problem lurking in the classical picture that only becomes visible when we think about time. Mullins puts it this way: if God is timelessly wrathful toward sinners, then God is wrathful toward them before they sin. In fact, God is wrathful toward them from all eternity — wrathful toward them before they even exist, before they have had any chance to act, before they have had any opportunity to do either good or evil.³²

Think about what this means. Sally is born at time t. She does not commit her first sin until later, perhaps at time t+5 years. But on the classical picture, God is already wrathful toward her — indeed, God has eternally been wrathful toward her, long before she was born, long before she did anything wrong. This seems unjust. It seems like God's wrath has gotten ahead of its proper object. Wrath is a response to wrongdoing. It is the appropriate moral reaction to sin. But if the wrath is there from all eternity, before any wrong has been done, how can it be an appropriate response?

The passibilist, by contrast, has no such problem. On the passibilist view, God has an unchanging moral standard that requires Him to respond with wrath to sin. But God does not actually have wrath toward a particular sinner until that sinner has actually sinned. The decree to treat sinners with wrath is eternal; the wrath itself occurs in time, in response to actual sin.³³ Mullins makes the same point in discussing the passibilist solution. A perfectly good God, he observes, will treat sinners and saints differently, and will rejoice when sinners repent. God's moral will is constant, but His affections and actions toward creatures genuinely change as He deals with them over time.³⁴

The Classical Counter-Move: "Calibrated" Timeless Emotions

I have presented the wrath argument as a decisive challenge to classical impassibility. But a thoughtful classical theist will not simply concede. There is a counter-move that deserves serious engagement — and I want to engage it seriously before moving on.

The counter-move, if I may try to reconstruct it in my own words, goes something like this. The passibilist, says our classical theist, is treating God's emotions like our emotions. Our emotions are responses in time to particular events. But God's emotions are not like that. God has His emotions timelessly, but they are calibrated to temporal events. Imagine a function that takes temporal inputs and produces timeless outputs. God's wrath is such a function: it takes as input the timeless totality of all creaturely actions (past, present, and future), and produces as output God's single, unchanging, timeless emotional state of wrath toward sin. God does not have to go through a temporal process of learning about sin and then responding to it. He has always known about all sin — all of it, from all of history — and His timeless emotional state is calibrated to this total knowledge. So there is no dependence on any particular creature; there is only a timeless calibration to the totality of creaturely existence.³⁵

This is a sophisticated position. It tries to have the best of both worlds: a God who is emotionally "appropriate" to creaturely reality, but whose emotional states are not themselves temporal or changing. Let me offer several responses.

First, the dependence problem is not solved; it is just hidden. The classical theist wants to say that God's emotional state is "calibrated" to the totality of creaturely reality. But calibration is itself a relation of dependence. If God's wrath would have been different — even in its timeless form — had the totality of creaturely sin been different, then God's wrath depends on the totality of creaturely sin. The dependence is still there; it has just been generalized across all of history rather than localized to particular events. And generalized dependence is still dependence. The impassibilist claim that God's emotional life is completely independent of creation cannot survive this.

Second, the model cannot make sense of specific divine emotions directed at specific persons and events. The Bible does not just say that God has a general "timeless wrath" against the totality of sin. It says that God was angry at Israel for the golden calf (Exodus 32:10), that He grieved over the wickedness of Noah's generation (Genesis 6:6), that He was pleased with Abel's offering (Genesis 4:4), that He was moved with compassion at the suffering of His people (Judges 2:18). These are specific emotional responses to specific events. On the calibrated-timeless model, the language of "specific response" has to be explained away. God does not really respond to the golden calf incident in particular; He has a timeless emotional state that is merely "manifested" to creatures at that point in history. But this is just another version of the anthropopathic explaining-away move, which we have already seen fails to do justice to the biblical text.

Third, the model cannot account for God's emotional interaction with creatures in prayer. When a person prays to God — laments, petitions, intercedes — Scripture presents God as responding. He hears. He answers. He is moved by intercession (Exodus 32:14, where God relents after Moses intercedes — a passage I treat in depth in Chapter 18). On the calibrated-timeless model, God's responsiveness to prayer is not really responsiveness; it is just another manifestation of the single, timeless emotional state. But this makes a mockery of the language of Scripture, and it makes a mockery of the practice of prayer. Why pray if God's emotional state is eternally fixed and cannot be moved?³⁶

Fourth, the model requires B-theory about time. For the "calibrated-timeless" model to work, God has to have timeless access to the totality of creaturely history — past, present, and future all at once, as a single "block" of reality. This is precisely what B-theory of time asserts (see Chapter 24). But B-theory is deeply problematic both philosophically and theologically, as I argue at length in Chapter 24. If you have to embrace B-theory to make timelessness coherent, that is a heavy cost. And most Christians, when they reflect on the matter, find B-theory uncongenial to core Christian doctrines like the reality of the present, the genuineness of human action, and the open future (from a creaturely perspective).

Fifth, and most fundamentally, the calibrated-timeless model cannot preserve what emotional response actually is. I argued above that response has a before-and-after structure. If that structure is removed, we are no longer talking about response; we are talking about something else — perhaps a kind of timeless "emotional correlate" of creaturely events, but not a response. The classical theist can redefine the terms if they wish, but they should be honest that they have redefined them. And once we notice the redefinition, we have to ask whether the redefined terms are still the ones the Bible is using. I do not think they are.

So the "calibrated-timeless" counter-move, sophisticated as it is, cannot rescue classical impassibility from the wrath argument. The problem is too deep. Emotional response is inherently temporal, and no amount of philosophical ingenuity can make it non-temporal without changing its meaning into something else.

Foreknowledge Is Not Experience: A Crucial Distinction

At this point I want to address what I consider one of the most important — and most frequently confused — distinctions in this entire debate. The distinction is between knowing that something will happen and experiencing the response to it when it happens. These are two different things. And failing to keep them distinct has led to a great deal of confusion in the classical tradition about God and emotion.

Let me illustrate the distinction with a creaturely example. Suppose I know, with absolute certainty, that my daughter will break her arm falling off her bicycle tomorrow afternoon. (Let us suppose, for the sake of the illustration, that I have this kind of foreknowledge.) My knowledge is propositional. I know that she will break her arm. I can describe the event; I can predict the time; I can even imagine what it will be like. But tomorrow afternoon, when I actually witness her fall, when I hear her cry out, when I see the unnatural bend of her forearm — something happens in me that was not happening before. I experience the thing. I undergo the emotional weight of it in real time. My prior knowledge, however complete, did not involve this experiential dimension. Knowing and experiencing are not the same.³⁷

Philosophers sometimes call this the distinction between propositional knowledge and experiential knowledge (or knowledge by acquaintance). Propositional knowledge is knowledge that something is the case. Experiential knowledge is knowledge of what it is like — the qualitative, first-person dimension of the thing.³⁸

Mullins, in section 3.2 of God and Emotion, offers a vivid illustration of this distinction through a classic thought experiment about a scientist named Mary. Mary has grown up in a room decorated entirely in black and white. She has read everything there is to know about color theory. She knows every proposition about the color red — the wavelengths, the retinal responses, the cultural associations. But she has never seen red. Now she leaves her room for the first time and sees a rose. Does her knowledge grow? Most of us have a strong intuition that yes, it does. She now knows something she did not know before — namely, what it is like to see red. That experiential knowledge was not captured in any proposition, however detailed. It required actual acquaintance with the world.³⁹

Why does this matter for our argument? Because the classical theist often tries to rescue divine emotion by appealing to divine foreknowledge. The move, paraphrased, goes something like this. Even if God does not change emotionally in response to temporal events, God nonetheless has the appropriate emotions — because God eternally knows everything that will happen, and because He knows it, He timelessly has the appropriate emotional calibration to it. So divine foreknowledge covers what temporal response would cover for a creature.⁴⁰

But this move confuses propositional knowledge with experiential knowledge. Knowing that Sally will kick a puppy at time t is not the same as experiencing, at time t, the emotional weight of witnessing Sally kick the puppy. These are different kinds of cognitive states. And Scripture consistently presents God as having not just the former but the latter. God knows what will happen (propositional); but God also experiences what happens as it happens (experiential). He grieves when His people sin. He rejoices when they repent. His emotional life tracks the unfolding of history in real time, not just abstractly from all eternity.⁴¹

If God has experiential knowledge of creation — if God experiences what His creatures experience, knows what it is like to encounter them as they unfold in history — then God is temporal. Because experiential knowledge, like emotion, has a temporal structure. You experience things as they happen, in real time. Even if you have perfect foreknowledge of what will happen, the experience of it happening is a distinct cognitive event that occurs at the time of the event, not timelessly.

Linda Zagzebski has developed this point powerfully in her work on what she calls divine "omnisubjectivity." Zagzebski defines omnisubjectivity, roughly, as the property of consciously grasping, with perfect accuracy, the first-person perspective of every conscious creature.⁴² She argues that an omniscient God must be omnisubjective — that is, God must have perfect experiential knowledge of what it is like to be each of His creatures, from their own first-person perspectives. And, crucially, she notes that omnisubjectivity is incompatible with impassibility. Because to have experiential knowledge of someone's suffering is to experience something of that suffering oneself. Zagzebski puts the key point memorably: a perfect copy of pain is still pain. So if God has perfect experiential knowledge of creaturely suffering, God is, in some meaningful sense, affected by it.⁴³

Mullins endorses and extends Zagzebski's point, arguing in section 3.3 of God and Emotion that an omnisubjective God must be moved, in some measure, by creation. For God's empathic knowledge of a creature to be real, that knowledge has to be grounded in and derived from the creature — and such empathic knowledge involves God having a genuine empathic experience of that other person.⁴⁴ This is a significant argument. An omniscient God — truly omniscient, knowing all there is to know, including the what-it-is-like of creaturely existence — cannot be impassible. And cannot be timeless.

I want to press this further, because it connects to the author's own model of God's relationship to time. My view — developed at length in Chapter 7 of this book and applied throughout — is that God has exhaustive foreknowledge through what I call "transcendent temporal access." God can see all of time, not because He is timeless, but because He has a unique kind of access to the temporal order. But this foreknowledge does not substitute for experiential response. Even though God knows the whole of history from His privileged position, He still experiences events in real time as they occur. He experiences them in a way that is qualitatively different from pure prediction. He is genuinely present at every moment, engaging with what is happening, responding with appropriate emotions.

Think of it this way. A father might know, before his daughter is born, every single thing that will happen in her life — every joy, every sorrow, every moment of triumph and every moment of pain. But this comprehensive foreknowledge does not mean that he does not experience any of it when it happens. When his daughter graduates from college, he still feels the joy of that moment — even though he knew it was coming. When she breaks her heart over a broken relationship, he still feels the sorrow of that moment — even though he foresaw it. Foreknowledge and experience are two different things, and the presence of one does not cancel the other.

God, on my view, is like this — but with perfect foreknowledge. He knows everything that will happen. But He also genuinely experiences each moment as it happens. His emotional life is real, responsive, engaged. He grieves in real time over Israel's rebellion. He rejoices in real time when a sinner repents. He is not a distant, unmoved observer of a foreordained script. He is a living God, present in every moment, feeling what His creatures feel, responding to what they do.⁴⁵

The Mutual Reinforcement of Passibility and Temporality

Up to this point, the argument has moved from passibility to temporality: because God has genuine emotions, therefore God must be temporal. But the relationship runs both ways. Once we affirm temporality on other grounds — from the biblical evidence, from the Incarnation, from creation, from the Trinity — we find that passibility becomes very difficult to avoid. The two doctrines mutually reinforce each other, such that affirming either one puts pressure on the classical package as a whole.⁴⁶

Let me spell this out. Suppose we grant, on the basis of arguments from other chapters, that God is temporal. God experiences real succession. God has a genuine "now" in which He acts and responds. The question then becomes: what sorts of emotional states can such a being have?

It would be very strange to say that a temporal God has all His emotional states timelessly. A temporal being has a temporal inner life. He does different things at different times. He thinks new thoughts, forms new intentions, attends to new objects. If His emotional life is cut off from this temporal flow — fixed once and for all in some eternal "now" that never changes — then His emotional life is not really part of His temporal existence. It is a timeless island in an otherwise temporal sea. This is not an impossible view, but it is strange and hard to motivate. Why would God's emotions be the one part of His inner life that is timeless, while everything else is temporal?

Much more natural, on a temporal view of God, is to hold that God's emotions are themselves temporal. They arise, they respond, they flow with the unfolding of history. This is what passibilism affirms, and this is what the Bible describes. The mutual reinforcement works like this: temporality makes room for passibility; passibility is natural on a temporal view; and affirming both together gives us a unified, coherent picture of God's inner life.

The classical package goes the other way. Timelessness, immutability, simplicity, and impassibility form a tight cluster. Each entails or strongly supports the others. A simple God cannot have emotional changes, because change requires complexity. A timeless God cannot have emotional changes, because change requires succession. A strongly immutable God cannot have emotional changes, because that is the very definition of change. And an impassible God, by definition, has no emotional changes. So if you affirm any one of these strongly, you are under pressure to affirm the others. And if you reject any one of them — as the passibilist does — you are under pressure to reject the others as well.⁴⁷

This is why the debate about divine emotions is not a minor theological disagreement. It is a clue to a whole vision of God. The classical vision — timeless, simple, impassible, strongly immutable — is a deeply integrated system. The alternative vision — temporal, dynamically related, genuinely emotional, relationally responsive — is also a deeply integrated system. These are two competing accounts of what kind of being God is. And the biblical evidence, I have argued throughout this book, favors the second.

I want to add a further point here about the theological stakes. The doctrine of impassibility did not arise out of careful biblical exegesis. It arose out of a desire to protect God's "dignity" in categories derived from Greek philosophy, where the impassible sage was the ideal human being and the impassible divine was the ideal deity.⁴⁸ But the God of the Bible is not the impassible sage writ large. He is the God who hears the cry of His people in Egypt (Exodus 3:7), who is grieved by His people's rebellion (Psalm 78:40), who feels compassion for the weary crowds (Matthew 9:36), who weeps at the death of a friend (John 11:35), who rejoices over the repentant sinner (Luke 15:7). To swap the biblical God for the Greek philosophical ideal is to make a fundamental error — an error that has distorted Christian theology for too long, and that must be undone if we are to recover the living God of Scripture.⁴⁹

Objections and Responses

Before concluding, I want to address several additional objections that a thoughtful reader might raise. Each objection is worth taking seriously, and each, I believe, has a good response.

Objection 1: "Doesn't Passibility Make God Unstable?"

The classical theist sometimes objects that a passible God is an unstable God. If God's emotional state changes with creaturely events, does that not make Him a being whose happiness is at the mercy of creation? Does it not threaten divine blessedness and divine sovereignty? Should we not want a God whose joy is unshakable, whose peace is uncaused, whose happiness is fully secured in Himself?⁵⁰

This objection has real force, and I want to respond carefully. First, I agree that God's essential happiness is secure. God's nature does not change. His moral character does not change. His fundamental joy in the eternal love of the Trinity does not change. In this sense, God is "blessed" in a way that creatures are not.

But essential happiness is not the same as emotional imperturbability. A wise and mature human being can have a settled core of inner peace while also being genuinely moved by the suffering of others. A parent can be fundamentally joyful in their family life while also grieving over a child's illness. Moral and spiritual stability is not incompatible with real emotional responsiveness; indeed, the two go together.

God, I submit, is like this but infinitely more so. His essential nature is not threatened by anything that happens in creation. His fundamental joy in His own trinitarian life is secure. But within that secure, unchanging nature, His relational and emotional life engages genuinely with creation. When His creatures suffer, He grieves. When they rejoice, He rejoices with them. This does not destabilize Him. It is, rather, the expression of His love.⁵¹

Objection 2: "Doesn't This Make God Too Much Like Us?"

Another objection: does the passibilist view make God too anthropomorphic? Too much like a human being with human emotional reactions? Classical theism has traditionally emphasized God's otherness, His transcendence, His un-creatureliness. Does passibility threaten this?

The response is that God's emotions, on the passibilist view, are not identical to human emotions. God's emotions are analogous to human emotions — similar in some respects, different in others. God's emotions are always rational, always morally perfect, always calibrated to the true value of the object. God never has emotions that are out of control, destructive, or sinful. God's wrath is never petty or vindictive; it is always the righteous response of holy love to the disvalue of sin. God's grief is never despairing; it is always held within the larger hope of redemption.⁵²

So passibility does not make God a giant, super-powered human. It makes God a Being who genuinely cares, who truly loves, who actually responds — but who does all of this in a way that is perfect, uncorrupted, and utterly beyond anything we experience. Analogical language allows us to say something meaningful about God's emotional life without reducing Him to our level.

Objection 3: "What About Malachi 3:6?"

Malachi 3:6 says, "For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed." James 1:17 says there is with God "no variation or shadow due to change." Do these verses not support classical immutability, and therefore impassibility and timelessness?

I treat these passages in more depth in Chapter 19 and Chapter 30, so I will only note briefly here what I argue there. These verses teach a kind of immutability, yes — but they do not teach the strict classical kind. Malachi 3:6 is set in a context of covenant faithfulness; God's covenant loyalty is what does not change. The verse is a promise to faithless Israel that God's commitment to them is unwavering. It is not a metaphysical claim that God undergoes no intrinsic change whatsoever. Similarly, James 1:17 is teaching the consistency of God's good-gift-giving character; it is not a claim about timelessness or strict immutability. The biblical portrait is of a God whose character and covenant do not change, but whose emotional and relational life does change in genuine interaction with creation.⁵³

Objection 4: "Did Jesus' Divine Nature Suffer?"

A traditional worry about passibility is that it threatens Christology. The classical tradition has held that Christ suffered in His human nature but not in His divine nature (the communicatio idiomatum rightly understood). If God is passible, does that mean God the Son, in His divine nature, suffered on the cross? And does this not violate the orthodox Christological formulations?

This is a serious question, and a full treatment would require more space than I have here. But let me make three brief points. First, the claim that the divine nature "did not suffer" in the strict classical sense depends on the prior commitment to impassibility — if impassibility is rejected, the claim needs to be restated. Second, even passibilists can and should affirm that the Son's sufferings on the cross were experienced in and through His humanity; the human nature was the site of the suffering. Third, nonetheless, the Person who suffered was the divine Person, the Son — and so in some real sense, God did suffer. This is the insight of the theologians who speak, rightly, of a "crucified God" (Moltmann).⁵⁴ I treat the fuller relationship between the Incarnation and divine temporality in Chapter 27.

Objection 5: "Doesn't This Lead to Open Theism?"

Finally, a worry that often surfaces in evangelical circles: does affirming divine passibility and temporality lead, inevitably, to open theism — the view that God does not know the future? Open theists do typically affirm passibility and temporality. Does the logic push the same way?

No. And I treat this at length in Chapter 32. Passibility and temporality are compatible with robust divine foreknowledge, as I have indicated above. God can be temporal and yet have full knowledge of the future — not because He stands "outside" time in some Boethian sense, but because He has transcendent temporal access, a unique ability to see all of time while Himself being temporal. On my view, God knows every future event with absolute certainty. He is not "updating" His knowledge as events unfold. He already knows what will happen. But He still experiences each moment as it occurs, and emotionally engages with it in real time. Passibility does not entail open theism. The two positions can be, and ought to be, separated.⁵⁵

The Pastoral Payoff

Before concluding, I want to pause for a moment and speak pastorally. This chapter has been heavy on philosophy. But the doctrine of divine passibility — the doctrine that God really feels, really responds, really cares — is not merely a philosophical curiosity. It matters deeply for the Christian life.

Consider prayer. If God is timelessly and changelessly blessed, unable to be affected by what happens in the world, what is the point of praying? Prayer becomes a kind of spiritual calisthenics — good for us, perhaps, but not something that actually reaches God's heart. But if God is passible — if He truly hears, truly listens, truly responds — then prayer is a real conversation with a real Person. Our cries reach His ears. Our tears move His heart. Our intercessions make a difference. This is exactly how Scripture presents prayer: as a genuine interaction with a living God who responds to us.⁵⁶ I treat this at length in Chapter 35.

Consider suffering. When we go through hard times — illness, grief, loss, injustice — we long for a God who is with us in it. Not a distant, unmoved deity who observes our pain from outside. A God who enters in, who feels our hurt, who carries our sorrows. This is the God of Isaiah 63:9: "In all their affliction he was afflicted." This is the God of the Psalms, who "is near to the brokenhearted." This is the God whose tears mingle with ours at the graves of our loved ones, as Jesus' did at Lazarus's tomb. A passible God is a God who can actually be present in suffering. An impassible God can, at best, be the detached architect of a system in which suffering occurs — but He cannot be with us in the suffering itself.⁵⁷

Consider worship. Why do we praise God? Not only because He is majestic and powerful, but because He loves us. Because He is good to us. Because He delights in His children. The biblical pictures of God's love — the father running to the prodigal, the shepherd going after the lost sheep, the mother hen gathering her chicks — are pictures of a God whose heart is genuinely engaged with His people. Strip away the passibility, and you strip away much of what makes God worshipable. The love of a timeless, unchanging, emotionally-fixed deity is hard even to recognize as love.⁵⁸

Consider, finally, evangelism and the lost. Does God truly grieve over those who perish? Does He genuinely desire their salvation? Second Peter 3:9 says He is "not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance." Ezekiel 33:11 says that God has "no pleasure in the death of the wicked." These are emotional descriptions of God's attitude toward the lost. They describe a God whose heart breaks over sin and whose joy is magnified by repentance. A passible God can genuinely grieve the loss of the lost, and can genuinely rejoice at their return. An impassible God cannot do either — or can only do so in some diminished, non-literal sense that does justice neither to the biblical language nor to the Christian hope.⁵⁹

The doctrine of passibility, in short, is not a minor technical matter. It shapes our prayer, our worship, our understanding of suffering, our evangelism. It shapes our vision of the God we serve. And that is why the argument of this chapter matters. Affirming divine temporality is not just an academic position. It is the foundation for a God who can actually be the God of Scripture — the living, loving, feeling, responsive God who invites us into relationship with Himself.

Conclusion: The Beating Heart of God in Time

Let me draw together the threads of this chapter.

I began with the claim that genuine emotional response requires temporal sequence — a before (the event) and an after (the response). This is what response is. You cannot have response without succession.

From there I moved to the wrath argument, developed by Ryan Mullins. Classical theism holds that God has the emotion of wrath. But wrath has an object, and the object of God's wrath is creaturely sin. So God's wrath is influenced by creatures. But impassibility forbids God being influenced by anything external. Contradiction. The three escape routes — denying that God has wrath, denying that creatures cause it, or adopting the "happy wrath" model — all fail. The argument stands.

I then addressed the classical counter-move: that God has His emotions "timelessly" but "calibrated" to temporal events. I argued that this move fails to preserve what emotional response actually is; that it cannot account for specific divine emotions directed at specific events; that it cannot make sense of God's responsiveness to prayer; that it requires the problematic B-theory of time; and that it ultimately just relocates the dependence relation without eliminating it.

I distinguished carefully between foreknowledge (propositional knowledge of what will happen) and experiential response (the first-person experience of the thing when it happens). These are different kinds of cognitive states, and the presence of one does not substitute for the other. An omniscient God has both — and therefore, following Zagzebski, must be omnisubjective in a way that is incompatible with impassibility and timelessness.

I showed the mutual reinforcement of passibility and temporality: each doctrine supports the other, and together they form a coherent alternative to the classical package of timelessness-immutability-simplicity-impassibility. And I responded to several major objections, showing that passibilism does not make God unstable, does not collapse into crude anthropomorphism, is compatible with biblical texts about divine unchangingness, does not contradict orthodox Christology, and does not entail open theism.

The upshot, I believe, is clear. The God of the Bible genuinely loves, genuinely grieves, genuinely responds. His emotional life is real, not metaphorical; engaged, not detached; responsive, not timelessly fixed. And this emotional life requires — really requires — a God who is temporal, who has a "now" in which to feel and to act and to respond. A passible God must be a temporal God. The two doctrines stand or fall together.

This has been, in some ways, a philosophical chapter. But the conclusion is not merely philosophical. It is deeply biblical and deeply pastoral. The God we meet in Scripture is not the frozen deity of certain philosophical traditions. He is the living God who hears and answers, who cares and responds, who grieves and rejoices, who loves and is moved by love. He is the God whose heart beats with eternal love for His people — and whose heart beats in time, with them, through all the days of their lives.

As we move into the next chapter on divine providence and action, we will build on what has been established here. A God who emotionally engages with creation in real time is a God who acts in real time. He intervenes. He answers prayers. He guides history. He works in the world. This acting God is not a distant First Cause of a mechanistic universe. He is the living God, whose hand shapes history and whose heart feels every twist and turn of it. That is the God the Bible presents. That is the God Christians worship. And that is the God this book is arguing for.