Part II: The Three Positions

Chapter 6

The Anthropomorphism Objection

Is It All Just Figurative Language?

Part II: The Three Positions — Impassibility, Passibility, and the Middle Way

Introduction: The Escape Hatch

Imagine you have just finished laying out the biblical evidence for divine emotion to a thoughtful theologian who holds to classical theism. You have walked through passage after passage — God grieving over human wickedness in Genesis 6, burning with anger in Exodus 32, aching with parental anguish in Hosea 11, weeping through the prophets in Jeremiah 8–9, rejoicing over His people with singing in Zephaniah 3:17. You have shown more than four hundred passages where Scripture describes God's emotional engagement with His creatures. And then your conversation partner smiles politely and says, "Yes, but those are just anthropomorphisms."

That single word — "anthropomorphism" — has served as the escape hatch for classical theism for centuries. It is the tool that allows a theologian to look at hundreds of passages describing God's grief, anger, joy, compassion, jealousy, sorrow, and love, and to set them all aside as figurative language that tells us nothing about what God is actually like on the inside. Just as God does not literally have "hands" or "eyes" or "wings," so — the argument goes — God does not literally "grieve" or "burn with anger" or "rejoice." It is all metaphor. It is all accommodation. It is all figurative.

This chapter argues that the anthropomorphism objection fails — and that it fails badly. The claim that all biblical descriptions of God's emotions are "merely anthropomorphic" or "merely metaphorical" does not hold up under careful biblical, theological, or philosophical scrutiny. And far from solving problems, it actually creates far more serious ones than the problems it was designed to avoid. If we follow the anthropomorphism objection to its logical conclusion, we are left with a God who systematically misleads us about His own inner life — a God who tells us He grieves when He doesn't, who tells us He loves when He feels nothing, who describes Himself in emotional terms that have no correspondence to anything real in His experience. That is a devastating conclusion, and I believe we should reject it.

The thesis of this chapter is straightforward: the claim that all biblical descriptions of God's emotions are "merely anthropomorphic" or "merely metaphorical" fails on biblical, theological, and philosophical grounds — and it creates more problems than it solves. The language of divine emotion in Scripture is best understood as analogical — pointing to something genuinely real in God's experience, even though God's emotions are not identical to ours in every respect.

What Is an Anthropomorphism?

Before we can evaluate the anthropomorphism objection, we need to understand what an anthropomorphism actually is. The word comes from two Greek words: anthropos (ἄνθρωπος), meaning "human being," and morphē (μορφή), meaning "form" or "shape." An anthropomorphism is a description of God using human physical characteristics — God's "hand," God's "eyes," God's "arm," God's "nostrils," God's "wings." Since God is spirit (John 4:24), these physical descriptions are clearly figurative. God does not literally have a right hand or a pair of eyes or feathered wings. The language is borrowing from human bodily experience to describe realities about God that transcend physical form. When the psalmist writes, "He who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep" (Psalm 121:4), the reference to God "watching" uses the language of sight, but the point is about God's unfailing vigilance and care — not about literal eyes.

Nearly all theologians — including those of us who affirm genuine divine emotion — agree that physical anthropomorphisms are figurative. God does not have a body. Therefore, descriptions of God's body parts are metaphorical ways of communicating truths about God's actions, power, knowledge, and care. The "arm of the LORD" (Isaiah 53:1) communicates God's strength and saving power. The "eyes of the LORD" (2 Chronicles 16:9) communicate His comprehensive knowledge and watchful attention. The "shadow of your wings" (Psalm 17:8; 36:7) communicates His protective presence. We all agree on this. The question is not about hands and eyes and wings.

The real question is about a closely related but importantly different category: anthropopathism. This word also comes from Greek: anthropos plus pathos (πάθος), meaning "feeling" or "suffering." An anthropopathism is a description of God using human emotional characteristics — God's grief, God's anger, God's joy, God's love, God's jealousy, God's compassion. And here is where the debate gets interesting. The classical theist who holds to strict impassibility says that anthropopathisms work the same way as anthropomorphisms: just as "the hand of the LORD" is figurative, so "the grief of the LORD" is figurative. Just as God does not literally have hands, so God does not literally grieve.

But does the analogy actually hold? I am convinced it does not. And the reason it does not hold is crucial to this entire book.

Why the Analogy Breaks Down: Bodies and Emotions Are Not the Same

The anthropomorphism objection assumes that emotional language about God works the same way as physical language about God. "The hand of the LORD" is figurative because God has no body. Therefore — so the argument goes — "the grief of the LORD" must also be figurative. But this reasoning contains a hidden assumption that deserves to be examined. The hidden assumption is that emotions, like physical body parts, require a material body. If emotions are nothing more than physical sensations — a churning stomach, sweaty palms, a lump in the throat, a rush of adrenaline — then yes, a God without a body cannot have emotions. If anger is nothing more than a surge of cortisol and a clenched jaw, then an immaterial God cannot be angry. If grief is nothing more than tears running down cheeks and a heavy feeling in the chest, then a spiritual God cannot grieve.

But as we explored in Chapter 2, this understanding of emotions is far too narrow. The cognitive-evaluative theory of emotions — which is the dominant view among contemporary philosophers and which aligns closely with the biblical portrait — holds that emotions are much more than physical sensations. Emotions involve cognition (thinking), evaluation (judging), intentionality (being about something), and purposeful response (acting in light of the evaluation). To be angry is not merely to feel a physical rush; it is to judge that a wrong has been committed and to respond with appropriate moral outrage. To grieve is not merely to cry; it is to recognize the loss of something precious and to respond with sorrow proportional to the value of what has been lost. To love is not merely to feel warm; it is to value another person deeply and to be committed to their good.¹

Once we understand emotions this way, the analogy between physical anthropomorphisms and emotional anthropopathisms collapses. Physical body parts require a material body. God has no material body. Therefore, God does not literally have hands. But cognitive-evaluative emotional responses do not require a material body. They require a mind capable of evaluation, a will capable of purposeful response, and a character that generates fitting emotional reactions to real situations. God has all of these. God has a mind. God evaluates situations. God responds purposefully. God's character generates responses to real situations in the world. There is no reason — on the cognitive-evaluative theory — to think that God cannot genuinely grieve, genuinely love, genuinely burn with righteous anger, or genuinely rejoice.²

Think of it this way. If I told you that a brilliant, immaterial, omniscient being was aware that a child was being tortured to death — and that this being had the character to recognize such an act as a profound moral evil — would you expect that being to have some kind of internal response to the situation? Would you expect the being to care? To be outraged? To grieve? Or would you expect it to observe the torture with the same serene indifference with which it observes the orbits of the planets? If emotions are cognitive-evaluative responses, then any being with a moral character and the ability to evaluate situations should be expected to have emotional responses — regardless of whether that being has a body.

Jesse Morrell captures this insight powerfully. He points out that even if we take emotional descriptions of God as anthropopathic language, they are not meaningless. Anthropomorphic language, Morrell argues, is not used to teach the opposite of what it implies. When the Bible says God "sees" something, it does not mean God is blind. When the Bible says God "hears" a prayer, it does not mean God is deaf. The figurative language is communicating something genuinely true about God — His awareness, His attentiveness — even if the precise mechanism differs from human sight or hearing. In the same way, even if one insists on calling the language of divine grief or anger "anthropopathic," it cannot mean that God is utterly devoid of any emotional response whatsoever. That would be taking the figure to mean the opposite of what it says.³

Morrell presses the point further with a devastating observation that deserves careful attention. If God's sorrow and sadness are merely anthropomorphic descriptions of Him, then it stands to reason that His joy and happiness must also be merely anthropomorphic. If God's anger is merely figurative and not literal, then His compassionate mercy must be merely figurative too. A denial of one means a denial of the other. But if God's love and compassion and joy are genuine, personal, and real — as virtually all Christians want to affirm — then so also are His grief and anger and jealousy. They stand or fall together.⁴

The Quantitative Argument: Over 400 Passages Cannot All Be Figurative

Let us now turn to what I consider one of the most powerful arguments against the anthropomorphism objection: the sheer volume of biblical evidence. Over four hundred passages in the Bible describe God's emotional engagement with His creatures. These are not clustered in one book or one genre. They span the Torah, the Historical books, the Prophets, the Psalms and Wisdom literature, the Gospels, the Epistles, and Revelation. They cover every period of biblical history from creation to the new heavens and new earth. They describe every conceivable emotion: love, compassion, mercy, joy, delight, grief, sorrow, anger, wrath, indignation, jealousy, zeal, hatred, patience, longsuffering, and more.⁵

The philosopher R. T. Mullins has drawn attention to the staggering implications of trying to dismiss all of this language as merely figurative. The classical theist who invokes the anthropomorphism objection must explain away every single one of these passages. She must say that when Scripture describes God as grieving over human wickedness (Genesis 6:6), it does not mean that God actually grieves. When God burns with anger at the golden calf (Exodus 32:10), it does not mean that God actually experiences anger. When God aches like a parent watching a child self-destruct — "How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? . . . My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused" (Hosea 11:8, NIV) — it does not mean that God's heart is actually moved. When the Father of the prodigal son runs to embrace his returned child in what Jesus clearly intends as a portrait of God's own heart (Luke 15:20), it does not mean that God actually feels that kind of overwhelming joy at a sinner's return.⁶

And here is the critical question that the anthropomorphism objection must answer: if all of these passages are merely figurative, what is the literal truth behind the figure? Every metaphor communicates something. When we say "the arm of the LORD," the literal truth behind the metaphor is God's power and strength. But when the impassibilist says that "the grief of the LORD" is merely a metaphor, what is the literal truth? What does the metaphor actually point to?

The two most common answers are deeply unsatisfying. The first answer is: "God acts as if He were grieved, but He isn't really." God does what a grieved person would do — He takes remedial action, He responds to the situation — but there is no actual grief in God's experience. His inner life remains one of undisturbed blessedness. The second answer is similar: "God does what a grieved person would do, but without actually feeling grief." Both answers describe a God who systematically behaves as though He has emotional responses while having none — a God whose external actions consistently and deliberately give the impression of an inner emotional life that does not exist.⁷

I find both of these answers deeply troubling, because they raise the specter of divine deception. If God consistently describes Himself as grieving but doesn't really grieve, is God misleading us about His own inner life? If God says "My heart is changed within me" and nothing in God's actual experience corresponds to that language, then God is giving us false information about Himself. And this is not just a few isolated passages that might be interpreted as poetic hyperbole — it is over four hundred passages spanning the entire canon of Scripture. It is the dominant way the Bible talks about God. If it is all misleading, then Scripture is a systematically unreliable guide to what God is actually like.

The Absence of Biblical Support for Impassibility

The anthropomorphism objection faces another devastating challenge. As Mullins observes, drawing on the work of the New Testament scholar Michael F. Bird, divine impassibility is the only major divine attribute for which no biblical support is ever offered. Think about how we defend other divine attributes from Scripture. Defenders of omniscience cite passages about God's knowledge — "Great is our Lord and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure" (Psalm 147:5). Defenders of omnipotence cite passages about God's power — "Is anything too hard for the LORD?" (Genesis 18:14). Defenders of immutability cite passages about God's faithfulness — "I the LORD do not change" (Malachi 3:6). But defenders of impassibility cite no passages — because there are none. There is not a single verse in the entire Bible that says God does not feel, God cannot be moved, God has no emotional responses, or God exists in a state of undisturbed bliss unaffected by anything in creation.⁸

This is a remarkable observation, and it deserves to sink in. The entire case for impassibility rests on philosophical reasoning — not on biblical evidence. It rests on arguments about what God must be like given His perfection, immutability, simplicity, and aseity. These are important theological concepts, and we have engaged with them at length in Chapter 3. But they are philosophical inferences, not biblical data. And meanwhile, the case for passibility — the view that God genuinely feels and is genuinely affected by His creatures — rests on over four hundred passages of Scripture.⁹

The passibilist theologian John Peckham has pressed this point with particular force. Peckham argues that there is simply no biblical support for the doctrine of divine impassibility, and therefore the burden of proof falls squarely on those who would deny what Scripture so pervasively and consistently affirms. The Bible overwhelmingly portrays God as a being who feels — who loves, grieves, rejoices, burns with anger, aches with compassion, delights in His people, and is pained by their rebellion. The person who wants to explain all of this away as figurative language needs to provide a very good reason — and the philosophical arguments for impassibility, as we have seen in previous chapters, are far from watertight.¹⁰

The Selective Application Problem

One of the most telling weaknesses of the anthropomorphism objection is that it is almost always applied selectively. Most classical theists do not actually treat all divine emotion language as figurative. They are quite happy to affirm that God literally loves — indeed, that "God is love" (1 John 4:8, 16) is a statement about God's essential nature, not a mere metaphor. They affirm that God is genuinely good, genuinely holy, genuinely just. They may even affirm that God literally has wrath in some qualified sense. But when it comes to emotions that seem to imply vulnerability or change — grief, anguish, disappointment, hurt — suddenly the anthropomorphism card is played.

But as Morrell and others have pointed out, this selective application has no principled basis in the text of Scripture itself. The same genres, the same authors, the same passages often describe both "comfortable" and "uncomfortable" divine emotions side by side. In Hosea 11, God's burning compassion and His anguished cry "How can I give you up?" appear in the same breath. In Exodus 34:6–7, God's compassion, grace, love, and faithfulness are described in the same sentence as His anger and His refusal to leave the guilty unpunished. In Psalm 103:8–14, God's compassion "as a father has compassion on his children" sits alongside His awareness of human frailty. There is no textual basis for saying that some of these emotions are literal and others are figurative. The same literary forms, the same Hebrew vocabulary, the same theological framework undergirds them all.¹¹

Mullins presses this point in the context of his argument about divine wrath (developed fully in Chapter 23). If the classical theist tries to avoid the implications of divine wrath by saying that all wrath language is merely anthropopathic, she faces an immediate problem: if wrath is merely figurative, then on what basis do we say that love is literal? The Bible uses exactly the same kind of language, the same literary structures, and the same theological logic for both. The classical theist who says "God's love is real but God's wrath is merely a metaphor" is making a distinction that the biblical text does not support. As Mullins argues, the impassibilist who denies divine wrath must also deny divine love — or else explain why love-language is literal while wrath-language is figurative, a distinction for which no biblical basis exists.¹²

The Metaphor Problem: What Is Wrath a Metaphor For?

Even if we grant the classical theist the possibility that divine emotion language is metaphorical, a serious problem remains: what is the metaphor pointing to? Every good metaphor has a "target" — a literal reality that the figurative language is trying to communicate. If "the arm of the LORD" is a metaphor, the target is God's power. If "the eyes of the LORD" is a metaphor, the target is God's knowledge and watchful care. So if "the wrath of God" is a metaphor, what is the target?

Some classical theists have proposed that divine wrath is a metaphor for God's judicial principles — His moral commitment to punishing sin and rewarding righteousness. On this view, God does not actually feel angry. Rather, He calmly and serenely administers justice according to fixed moral principles. Unrepentant sinners experience God's love as if it were wrath, but wrath is not actually something God experiences. His inner life remains one of undisturbed happiness.¹³

The nineteenth-century theologian Marshall Randles adopted precisely this kind of metaphorical strategy. Randles argued that the biblical phrases about divine wrath must be taken in a way that does not conflict with God's perfect happiness. He proposed that God's wrath could be understood as God's pleasure at the prevalence of right against wrong — a kind of judicial satisfaction in the condemnation of sin and the overthrow of evil.¹⁴

But as Mullins has shown, Randles's strategy does not actually escape the problem. Randles says that the biblical claims about God's emotional life should be understood as "the moral principles by which He is actuated towards offenders." Notice that word: "actuated." To be actuated is to be motivated by something — to be moved to action by an external cause. Randles is saying that God is motivated by sinners to perform certain actions. But this is precisely what divine impassibility denies. Impassibility says that God cannot be influenced by anything external to His own nature. As the strict impassibilist James E. Dolezal insists, our sins "have no effect on God." If Randles is right that God is actuated by sinners to perform judicial actions, then God is being causally influenced by creatures — which is exactly what passibility means.¹⁵

This is a critical insight that deserves emphasis. Even when classical theists try to provide a metaphorical account of divine wrath, the metaphor itself seems to require exactly the kind of divine responsiveness that impassibility was supposed to rule out. You cannot have a God who responds to sin with judicial action — even metaphorical or purely volitional action — without acknowledging that God is in some way affected by and responsive to what creatures do. And once you have acknowledged that, you have acknowledged the core claim of passibility.

The Atonement Problem

The anthropomorphism objection faces yet another challenge, one that strikes at the very heart of Christian soteriology — the doctrine of salvation. If divine wrath is merely anthropomorphic or anthropopathic, then what happens to the doctrine of propitiation? Propitiation is the theological concept that Christ's death on the cross satisfied or turned aside the wrath of God against sin. It is a central doctrine in evangelical theology, affirmed on the basis of passages like Romans 3:25, 1 John 2:2, and 1 John 4:10.

But here is the problem. If God's wrath is merely a figure of speech — if there is no actual emotional reality in God that corresponds to the word "wrath" — then the satisfaction of God's wrath is also merely a figure of speech. An anthropomorphic wrath receives an anthropomorphic satisfaction. A merely figurative anger is met with a merely figurative propitiation. And this has devastating implications for the theology of the atonement. If God does not actually feel wrath toward sin, then Christ did not actually satisfy any real divine emotion on the cross. The entire logic of propitiation depends on there being something real in God — a genuine response to sin — that needs to be addressed.¹⁶

This point was made with great force by Morrell, and I believe it is one of the most underappreciated arguments in this entire debate. Theologians who hold to divine impassibility and also hold to penal substitutionary atonement are sitting on an internal contradiction. They want to say that God's wrath is merely figurative, but they also want to say that Christ's death genuinely satisfied that wrath. You cannot have it both ways. Either God's wrath is real — in which case God has genuine emotional responses and impassibility is false — or God's wrath is merely a metaphor, in which case the cross did not genuinely propitiate anything.¹⁷

Anthropomorphism Is Not the Opposite of Truth

We need to step back and recognize something that is often overlooked in this debate: even genuine anthropomorphisms are not empty of theological content. They are not decorative. They are not filler. They communicate real truths about God, even when the specific imagery is figurative. When the Bible says God "sees" (Genesis 6:8), it communicates something genuinely true — that God has a knowing faculty, that He is aware of reality, that He is not blind to what happens in His creation. Even if we take the language of divine "seeing" as anthropomorphic, it cannot mean that God is unaware or oblivious. The figure communicates something real.¹⁸

The same principle applies to emotional language. Even if one insists on calling divine grief or divine anger "anthropopathic," the language still communicates something genuinely true about God. It communicates that God is not indifferent. It communicates that evil elicits a genuine response from God's character. It communicates that God values His creatures and their choices. To say that all divine emotion language is "merely" anthropomorphic — as if the word "merely" settles the matter — is to strip these passages of any theological meaning whatsoever. And that is a conclusion that no careful reader of Scripture should accept.

The Old Testament theologian Ludwig Köhler made this point beautifully. Anthropomorphisms, Köhler argued, are not designed to reduce God to a level similar to that of human beings. To describe God in human terms is not to humanize Him. Rather, the purpose of anthropomorphisms is to make God accessible — to hold open the door for encounter between God's will and humanity's will. They represent God as a person. They avoid the error of presenting God as a careless, soulless abstract Idea or a fixed Principle. God is personal. He has a will. He exists in interaction, ready to communicate Himself, offended at people's sins yet with a ready ear for their prayers and compassion for their confessions of guilt. In a word, God is a living God.¹⁹

This is exactly right. The language of divine emotion exists in Scripture because God wants us to know Him as a person — not as an abstract principle, not as an unmoved force, not as a cosmic computer. The emotional language opens a door into God's inner life. It invites us into a genuine relationship with a God who feels, who cares, who is moved by what happens in His world. To slam that door shut by labeling everything "merely anthropomorphic" is to miss the entire point of why God revealed Himself this way.

The Incarnation Argument: God Has Acted Anthropomorphically

There is one more argument against the anthropomorphism objection that I find deeply compelling, and it comes from the very heart of Christian theology — the incarnation. The Old Testament scholar Terence Fretheim made a point that should stop every Christian in their tracks: Christians should have no difficulty using anthropomorphic language for God, because in Jesus Christ, God has acted in a remarkably anthropomorphic way. A direct line connects the emotional language of the Old Testament and God's becoming flesh in Jesus Christ, "the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15). In this human being, God reveals most fully who He is, how He relates to us, and the depths to which He will go for our salvation.²⁰

Think about what this means. If "the hand of the LORD" is figurative because God does not have a literal hand, then the incarnation changes everything — because in Jesus Christ, God actually does have hands. He has eyes. He has a body. He walks, talks, eats, sleeps, bleeds, and dies. The incarnation is the ultimate anthropomorphism — God literally taking on human form. And in that human form, God displays emotions openly and unambiguously. Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:33–35). Jesus is moved with compassion for the crowds (Matthew 9:36). Jesus burns with righteous anger in the temple (Mark 3:5; John 2:13–17). Jesus agonizes in Gethsemane (Mark 14:33–34). Jesus rejoices in the Holy Spirit (Luke 10:21). And Jesus tells His disciples, "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9).

If Jesus reveals the Father — if seeing Jesus is genuinely seeing what the Father is like — then the emotions of Jesus are a window into the emotional life of God. And Jesus' emotions are not figurative. They are not metaphorical. They are real. The tears at Lazarus's tomb were real tears. The anger at the moneychangers was real anger. The anguish in Gethsemane was real anguish. These are the emotions of God incarnate — and they confirm that the emotional language of the Old Testament was pointing to something genuinely real in God all along. (We will explore the emotions of Jesus in depth in Chapter 20.)

Karl Barth captures this brilliantly when he observes that if there was ever a miserable anthropomorphism, it is the idea of a divine immutability that rules out the possibility that God can let Himself be conditioned by His creatures. God is certainly immutable — but He is immutable as the living God, in the mercy in which He takes up the cause of the creature. He can give to the creature a place in His will.²¹

Three Views of Religious Language: Univocal, Equivocal, and Analogical

To make progress on this question, we need to distinguish between three possible views of how religious language works. These three views are crucial for understanding the debate about divine emotion, and the author's position depends on getting this distinction right.

The first view is univocal language. On this view, words mean exactly the same thing when applied to God and to humans. If we say "God is angry" and "John is angry," the word "angry" means the same thing in both sentences — the same kind of experience, the same internal state, the same phenomenology. The advantage of univocal language is simplicity and directness — there is no gap between what Scripture says and what it means. The disadvantage is that it can flatten the distinction between Creator and creature. God's anger is presumably not identical to human anger in every respect. God does not lose His temper, slam a door, or say things He later regrets. Strict univocalism fails to account for the differences between divine and human emotional experience.²²

The second view is equivocal language. On this view, words mean something completely different when applied to God and to humans. If we say "God is angry" and "John is angry," the word "angry" means something so radically different in the two cases that there is no meaningful overlap at all. God's "anger" is not related in any substantive way to what we experience as anger. The advantage of equivocal language is that it preserves God's transcendence — God is so far above us that our language cannot truly capture anything about His inner life. The disadvantage is devastating: if all religious language is equivocal, then we can say nothing meaningful about God at all. To say "God is loving" would communicate nothing, because "loving" when applied to God means something entirely unrelated to what we know as love. As some theologians have pointed out, equivocal language makes God unknowable and strips all divine revelation of meaningful content.²³

The third view — and the one I believe is correct — is analogical language. On this view, words have a genuine but not identical meaning when applied to God and to humans. If we say "God is angry" and "John is angry," there is a real connection between what the word means in the two cases — both involve a response to perceived wrong, both involve a kind of opposition to evil — but there are also important differences. God's anger is never irrational, never out of control, never disproportionate, never self-serving. God's anger is always holy, always measured, always purposeful, always an expression of His love. The analogy works in both directions: it identifies genuine similarities (both divine and human anger are responses to moral wrong) while preserving genuine differences (God's anger is perfectly just and perfectly controlled in ways that human anger rarely is).²⁴

Crucially, on the analogical view, the analogy points upward, not downward. This is perhaps the most important point in this entire chapter. When we say "God loves," we are not saying that God has a watered-down version of human love. We are saying that human love is a pale reflection of divine love. God's love is the original; human love is the copy. God's grief is the deeper reality; human grief is the faint echo. God's joy is the full and perfect version; human joy is the dim approximation. The analogy points upward to a greater reality in God, not downward to a lesser one.

Thomas Aquinas himself recognized the power of analogical language, even though his overall system pushed toward a stronger form of impassibility than I believe is warranted. Aquinas held that we can know something about God through analogy — that names applied to God share meaningful but not identical similarities with their application to creatures. Every property, Aquinas argued, contains a certain quality (the res significata — the thing being communicated) and a mode of its possession (the modus significandi — the way the quality is held). While the quality may reveal genuine similarities between God and humans, the mode of possession highlights the differences. God possesses all properties in an infinite, perfect, divine capacity.²⁵

Roberto Sirvent has explored these three options for religious language at length in his study of divine vulnerability, and his analysis is worth engaging carefully. Sirvent shows that univocal language, equivocal language, and analogical language each have strengths and weaknesses, but that the analogical approach is the most faithful to both Scripture and theological reflection. Sirvent demonstrates that the concept of imitatio Dei — the ethical imperative to imitate God — actually presupposes that language about God has genuine, substantive content. If we are called to imitate God's love, God's compassion, God's mercy, and God's patience, then these words must mean something real when applied to God. Otherwise, we are being told to imitate something that has no content — and that makes the ethical command meaningless.²⁶

Metaphor and Its Limits

Some theologians have tried to navigate the terrain of religious language by appealing to the category of metaphor. G. B. Caird made the important observation that we have no other language besides metaphor with which to speak about God. This is an important point, and it should be acknowledged. All human language about God is in some sense limited. We are finite creatures attempting to describe an infinite God. Every word we use — even words like "exists" or "knows" or "acts" — stretches beyond its normal application when directed toward God.

But the fact that language about God is metaphorical does not mean it is empty. As Fretheim argues, metaphors reveal an essential continuity with the reality that is God. The metaphors of God as parent and husband, for example, define entire biblical books. The real danger, Fretheim insists, is either interpreting metaphors literally in every respect or — far more commonly today — denying any essential relationship between the metaphor and God. The interpreter must determine where the point of comparison lies. And significantly, when metaphorical language is used, it is not based on what is excluded from the writer's view of reality. To conclude that such language is merely pedagogical and reveals nothing of God's essential personhood makes all such language pointless.²⁷

Paul Ricoeur's philosophy of metaphor adds an important dimension to this discussion. Ricoeur argued that metaphor does not merely describe or reflect meaning — it creates new meaning. A living metaphor brings together two domains and generates new understanding that could not have been achieved any other way. When the Bible calls God a "father" or a "husband" or a "warrior" or a "shepherd," it is not merely borrowing convenient human images. It is opening up new possibilities for understanding who God is and how He relates to us. The metaphor generates genuine knowledge about God — knowledge that is real, even if it is not exhaustive.²⁸

The implication is clear. Even if we grant that much of the Bible's emotional language about God is metaphorical, the metaphors are still doing genuine theological work. They are revealing something true about God. They are opening up authentic knowledge of God's character and inner life. To dismiss them as "merely" metaphorical — as if the word "merely" removes their theological significance — is to misunderstand how metaphor works.

Abraham Heschel and the God of Pathos

No discussion of the anthropomorphism objection would be complete without engaging one of the most influential voices in modern theology on this question: the Jewish philosopher and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel. In his monumental work The Prophets, Heschel developed a concept that has shaped the entire modern discussion of divine emotion: the concept of divine pathos.

Heschel's argument begins with a simple but revolutionary observation. The God of the Hebrew prophets is not the God of Aristotle. He is not an unmoved mover who exists in a state of eternal, self-contained perfection. He is not the god of the Greek philosophers who cannot be affected by anything outside himself. The God of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, and Amos is a God who is passionately, intimately, and painfully involved with His creation. He loves with burning intensity. He grieves with aching depth. He burns with righteous fury. He aches with parental anguish. He rejoices with exuberant delight. His inner life is not static but dynamic — constantly responding to, interacting with, and being affected by what His people do.²⁹

Heschel called this the "divine pathos" — the passionate involvement of God with His world. And he argued that the prophets were not projecting human emotions onto God, as the anthropomorphism objection would suggest. They were not imagining that God felt things just because they felt things. Rather, the prophets were receiving genuine revelation of God's inner life. The prophetic experience, Heschel maintained, was fundamentally sympathetic — the prophet was drawn into God's own emotional experience, sharing in God's grief, God's anger, God's heartbreak over Israel's unfaithfulness. The prophet did not create the pathos; the prophet received it.³⁰

This is a profoundly important point. The anthropomorphism objection assumes that emotional language about God flows from bottom to top — from human experience upward to God, as human beings project their own emotional lives onto an impassible deity. But Heschel argued that the flow runs the other direction — from top to bottom. God's emotional life is the original reality, and human emotional life is the reflection. When the Bible describes God's pathos, it is not anthropomorphism (making God in our image); it is revelation (God disclosing His own inner life to us). We did not invent a grieving God based on our own grief. God revealed Himself as grieving because He genuinely grieves.

Heschel contrasted the God of pathos with the God of Aristotelian philosophy — the unmoved mover who thinks only about thinking, who is perfectly self-sufficient and utterly unaffected by the world. The God of Aristotle, Heschel argued, is philosophically elegant but religiously and morally empty. A God who does not care, does not grieve, does not burn with righteous anger at injustice is not a God worth worshiping. The God of the prophets, by contrast, is a God whose pathos flows from His moral character — He is grieved by sin because He is holy, He is angry at injustice because He is just, He is filled with compassion because He is loving. His emotional responses are not deficiencies. They are perfections.³¹

Walter Brueggemann and the Pain of God in the Prophets

Walter Brueggemann, the influential Old Testament theologian, has extended Heschel's insights into the prophetic literature with particular emphasis on God's vulnerability and pain. Brueggemann argues that the prophetic tradition consistently presents God as a God who is deeply and painfully affected by human behavior — particularly by the infidelity, injustice, and violence of His covenant people. The prophets do not present God's emotional life as a theological embarrassment to be explained away. They present it as the very core of God's character — the passionate intensity that drives God's commitment to justice, mercy, and covenant faithfulness.³²

Brueggemann draws attention to the remarkable portrait of God in the prophetic literature as one who holds sovereignty and pathos together. God is both the Lord of the universe and the heartbroken husband. God is both the judge of nations and the grieving parent. These are not contradictions to be resolved but truths to be held in tension. God's sovereignty and God's vulnerability are not in competition — they are two aspects of the same divine character. A God who did not care would not grieve. A God who was not sovereign could not act on His grief. The fact that God both grieves and acts reveals a God who is both powerful and personal — both transcendent and intimately involved.³³

Brueggemann's work reinforces a point we have been making throughout this chapter: the emotional language of the Bible is not an accommodation to our weakness. It is a revelation of God's character. The prophets were not putting words in God's mouth. They were delivering messages from a God who genuinely felt what He expressed. And the consistency of this portrait — across different prophets, different centuries, different political and social contexts — is itself powerful evidence that we are dealing with genuine revelation, not human projection.

Responding to the Counterarguments

We have presented a strong case against the anthropomorphism objection. But fairness requires that we consider the best counterarguments from those who hold to a more robust view of divine impassibility. Let me address the strongest objections.

Objection 1: "God is spirit, so He cannot have emotions"

This objection rests on the assumption that emotions require a body — an assumption we have already challenged at length. On the cognitive-evaluative theory of emotions, emotions involve evaluation, intentionality, and purposeful response. None of these require a physical body. A spiritual being with a mind, a will, and a moral character can evaluate situations, respond intentionally, and experience appropriate emotional states. Angels, who are immaterial beings, are described in Scripture as experiencing joy (Luke 15:10) — and no one considers this merely metaphorical. If immaterial angels can genuinely rejoice, there is no reason in principle why an immaterial God cannot genuinely grieve.³⁴

Objection 2: "God's immutability rules out emotional change"

This objection assumes a strict version of divine immutability — the view that God undergoes no change whatsoever. But as we explored in Chapter 3, the author holds a qualified immutability. God's essential character, moral attributes, and purposes never change. But God's relational states and emotional responses can and do genuinely change in response to creaturely actions. This does not compromise God's character — it expresses it. A God whose love, holiness, and justice are unchanging would be expected to respond differently to different moral situations. When people repent, God responds with joy. When people rebel, God responds with grief. These changes are not changes in God's essential nature — they are the natural expression of an unchanging character encountering changing circumstances. (The connection between divine emotion and divine temporality is explored more fully in the companion book, The God Beyond the Clock.)³⁵

Objection 3: "Emotions imply imperfection because they imply being affected by something external"

This objection assumes that being affected by creatures is a deficiency — a mark of dependence or vulnerability that is inappropriate for a perfect God. But we need to ask: is being affected by creatures always a deficiency? Or can it be a perfection? I believe that being affected by creatures — when freely chosen — is a perfection of love, not a deficiency. A parent who is moved by their child's suffering is more loving, not less, than a parent who watches the same suffering with detached indifference. A God who freely chooses to be affected by His creatures out of love is demonstrating the highest perfection of His character. As we explored in Chapter 4, God's passibility is not involuntary. God is not a victim of His emotions. He freely and sovereignly chooses to be affected by His creatures because that is what love does.³⁶

Objection 4: "The imago Dei does not require emotional correspondence"

Some theologians argue that while human beings are made in the image of God, this does not mean that every human trait has a divine counterpart. Humans have bodies, but God does not. Humans have gender, but God transcends gender. So why should we assume that human emotions have divine counterparts?

The response is that the imago Dei does not require one-to-one correspondence, but it does require genuine correspondence at the level of personhood. And personhood, in the biblical portrait, involves relational engagement, moral character, and emotional responsiveness. A God who created emotional beings in His image — and who commanded those beings to love, to grieve with those who grieve, to rejoice with those who rejoice — is a God whose own life includes the emotional capacities that He built into His image-bearers. The emotional life of human beings is not a random accident of biology. It is a reflection — however dim and distorted — of the emotional life of the God in whose image we were made.³⁷

Paul Helm and the Problem of Consistency

One of the most thoughtful defenders of the anthropomorphism objection is the Reformed philosopher Paul Helm. Helm argues that if we take emotional language about God literally, we face "embarrassing consequences" — since Scripture also attributes to God body parts that we readily acknowledge as figurative. If God literally weeps, Helm asks, does that mean He has eyes? If He has eyes, does He have eyelashes and eyebrows? How many eyes does He have? Does He have 20/20 vision?³⁸

Helm's argument has a surface plausibility, but Sirvent has exposed its underlying inconsistency. Helm is reluctant to ascribe human vulnerabilities to God, but he is perfectly comfortable ascribing "unimpaired knowledge" — itself a human term — to God. Why, Sirvent asks, is Helm not equally afraid that presenting God as "knowledgeable" will lead to the embarrassing consequence of claiming that God possesses a prefrontal cortex? If we can speak of God having unimpaired knowledge without assuming He has a brain, why can we not speak of God weeping without assuming He has tear ducts?³⁹

Sirvent proposes a more responsible and nuanced approach: see anthropomorphic language as a sliding scale, from aspects that are more fundamental and serious to those that are less so. The physical mechanism (tears, clenched fists, a raised arm) is the less fundamental aspect — the figure. The emotional or volitional reality being communicated (grief, anger, power) is the more fundamental aspect — the truth behind the figure. We can strip away the physical mechanism while preserving the emotional and moral reality that the language is communicating. God does not need tear ducts to grieve. He does not need a fist to be angry. He does not need a physical arm to act in power. But He does genuinely grieve, genuinely respond with righteous anger, and genuinely act with power — and the emotional language of Scripture is telling us something real about these genuine divine experiences.⁴⁰

The Imago Dei and the Direction of Revelation

One final consideration deserves attention as we bring this chapter toward its conclusion. The anthropomorphism objection assumes that when the Bible describes God in emotional terms, it is projecting human experience onto God — describing God in our terms because we have no better language. On this reading, human emotional experience is the original, and the biblical portrait of a grieving, rejoicing, angry God is the derived, figurative, accommodated version.

But the biblical narrative suggests exactly the opposite. In the Genesis account, God is described in emotional terms before human beings even exist. God evaluates His creation and declares it "very good" (Genesis 1:31) — a statement that implies satisfaction, delight, and approval. God "rests" on the seventh day (Genesis 2:2) — language that suggests a state of completion and contentment. Before there were human emotions to be "projected" onto God, God was already an emotional being. Humanity was then created in the image of this emotional God. Our emotions are the derivative reality; God's emotions are the original.

This means that anthropomorphism has the direction of explanation backwards. We are not making God in our emotional image. God made us in His emotional image. When we grieve, we are exercising a capacity that reflects — however faintly — God's own capacity for grief. When we love, we are echoing — however dimly — God's own love. When we burn with righteous anger at injustice, we are participating in a response that has its origin and its perfection in God's own righteous fury. Human emotions are the anthropomorphism — the human-shaped copy. God's emotions are the theomorphism — the divine original.⁴¹

This insight has been captured beautifully by Morrell, who argues that God's infinity should not be taken as a denial of His emotion but as an amplification of it. While our grief and broken hearts are finite, God's grief and broken heart are infinite. Who can measure divine grief? Who can measure the sorrow of deity? God's infinity amplifies His emotional life rather than negating it, just as the Bible does not deny the love of Christ but rather affirms that it is so immense that it "surpasses knowledge" (Ephesians 3:19).⁴²

Graham Cole and Biblically Qualified Impassibility

Before we conclude, it is worth noting that not all defenders of impassibility rely heavily on the anthropomorphism objection. Some, like the evangelical theologian Graham A. Cole, have developed what Cole calls a "biblically qualified" understanding of impassibility. On Cole's view, the distinction between anthropomorphism and anthropopathism is important. Physical descriptions of God (His arm, His eyes, His nostrils) are clearly metaphorical because God is spirit and does not have a body. But emotional descriptions of God are a different matter. As Cole argues, there is no obvious contradiction in ascribing emotions to God who is spirit. Emotions do not require a body. What they require is personhood — and God is the supreme person.⁴³

Cole draws an important distinction, borrowed from Tertullian, between emotions (motus and sensus) and passions (passiones). God has emotions and feelings as we do, but not those passions that undermine moral character. This is essentially the affections-versus-passions distinction that we explored in Chapter 2. God's emotional life is real, but it is always under His sovereign control — never irrational, never destabilizing, never out of proportion. This is much closer to the mediating position that this book defends, and it shows that even within the impassibility tradition, some of the most careful thinkers recognize that the anthropomorphism objection, taken to its logical extreme, proves too much.⁴⁴

Conclusion: Taking God at His Word

We have covered a great deal of ground in this chapter, and it is time to draw the threads together. The anthropomorphism objection — the claim that all biblical descriptions of God's emotions are "merely figurative" — fails for multiple converging reasons.

First, it rests on a flawed analogy between physical and emotional language. Physical anthropomorphisms are figurative because God does not have a body. But emotional language does not require a body. On the cognitive-evaluative theory of emotions, emotions involve evaluation, intentionality, and purposeful response — all of which are fully compatible with an immaterial, spiritual God.

Second, the quantitative evidence against the objection is overwhelming. Over four hundred passages across every genre and period of Scripture describe God's emotional engagement with His creatures. To explain all of these away as figurative requires a hermeneutical move so drastic that it undermines confidence in Scripture's ability to tell us anything meaningful about God's inner life.

Third, the anthropomorphism objection is applied selectively. Classical theists typically treat God's love as literal while treating God's grief, anger, and jealousy as figurative — but there is no principled textual basis for this distinction. The emotions stand or fall together.

Fourth, impassibility is the only major divine attribute for which no biblical support is ever cited. The entire case for impassibility rests on philosophical reasoning, while the case for passibility rests on over four hundred passages of Scripture. The burden of proof falls on the impassibilist, not the passibilist.

Fifth, even attempts to provide a metaphorical account of divine emotion end up smuggling in the very responsiveness that impassibility was supposed to rule out. If God is "actuated" toward sinners — if He responds to sin with judicial action, even metaphorically — then He is being affected by and responsive to creaturely behavior. And that is passibility.

Sixth, the anthropomorphism objection creates a devastating problem for the doctrine of the atonement. If God's wrath is merely figurative, then the propitiation of that wrath is also merely figurative — and the cross loses its theological power.

Seventh, the incarnation confirms that God's emotional language is not empty accommodation. In Jesus Christ, God revealed His heart in flesh — weeping, rejoicing, burning with anger, aching with compassion. And Jesus said, "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9).

The better alternative is the analogical approach. Biblical emotion language points to something genuinely real in God, even though God's experience differs from ours in important ways. The analogy points upward to a greater reality, not downward to a lesser one. God's love is more than ours, not less. God's grief is deeper than ours, not shallower. God's joy is fuller than ours, not emptier. When we read that God grieves, we should believe that something real in God — something deep and genuine and profoundly personal — corresponds to that language. We may not be able to describe exactly what that divine grief is like, any more than we can describe what divine omniscience or divine eternity is like in exhaustive detail. But we can trust that the language is pointing us toward truth, not away from it.

We can take God at His word. When He tells us He grieves, He grieves. When He tells us He loves, He loves. When He tells us His heart is changed within Him and all His compassion is aroused (Hosea 11:8), we can believe that His heart is genuinely moved. The God of the Bible is not a distant, detached, unmoved deity who describes Himself in emotional terms that have no connection to His actual experience. He is the living God — a God of passion, a God of pathos, a God whose heart beats for His people with an intensity and a tenderness that our language can only begin to approximate.

And that is very, very good news.