Part III: A Brief History of the Debate

Chapter 8

From the Middle Ages Through the Reformation

Introduction: From the Fathers to the Scholastics

In the previous chapter, we traced the development of divine impassibility through the early church. We saw that the Church Fathers held a more nuanced position than many modern scholars have recognized. Far from being uniformly rigid, the majority of the Fathers affirmed a "qualified impassibility" that denied God had irrational, involuntary, or bodily passions while still leaving room—sometimes awkwardly, sometimes beautifully—for genuine divine emotion. Figures like Irenaeus, Augustine, and Cyril of Alexandria all wrestled with how to affirm both God's sovereign transcendence and His genuine engagement with His creatures.

But what happened next? How did the conversation develop after the patristic era? Did the medieval theologians and the Reformers simply repeat what the Fathers had said, or did they take the discussion in new directions?

The answer, as we will see in this chapter, is both. In many ways, the medieval period formalized and sharpened the impassibility tradition. Under the massive influence of Aristotelian philosophy—especially as filtered through the genius of Thomas Aquinas—the qualified impassibility of the Fathers became more philosophically precise, more systematically integrated, and, I would argue, more rigid. The intuitive, pastoral wrestling we sometimes see in the Fathers gave way to a tightly constructed metaphysical system in which God's inability to feel was not just a theological conviction but a logical requirement of His nature as "pure act."

And yet, even within this more rigid framework, cracks appeared. Anselm of Canterbury, one of the greatest medieval thinkers, openly struggled with the tension between impassibility and compassion in a way that reads almost like a prayer of frustration. Luther's theology of the cross opened a window that would eventually become a doorway. Calvin's theory of divine accommodation contained seeds that could grow in more than one direction. Even Charnock, the great Puritan defender of strict impassibility, tucked telling admissions into his arguments that suggest the tradition was never quite as airtight as it appeared.

This chapter's thesis is straightforward: the medieval and Reformation periods largely continued the classical impassibility tradition, but with important modifications—particularly from Luther—that would later open the door to the modern reassessment of divine suffering. We are tracing a trajectory here, not attempting an exhaustive survey. The goal is to see how the tradition developed and where the seeds of the modern rethinking were planted.

We will examine five key figures and one major confessional document: Anselm of Canterbury, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Stephen Charnock, and the Westminster Confession of Faith. Together, they tell the story of how impassibility was both strengthened and subtly undermined during these centuries—often by the same theologians.

Anselm of Canterbury: The Paradox of Compassion

We begin with Anselm (ca. 1033–1109), the medieval monk who became Archbishop of Canterbury. Anselm is best known for his famous "ontological argument" for God's existence and his "satisfaction theory" of the atonement in Cur Deus Homo. But buried within his Proslogion—a work of prayerful meditation addressed directly to God—is one of the most honest and revealing passages in the entire impassibility tradition.

Like the mainstream patristic tradition before him, Anselm wanted to hold together two truths: that God is compassionate and that God is impassible. But unlike many of his predecessors, Anselm did not simply assert this and move on. Instead, he wrestled with the tension openly, in the form of a prayer. And the result is one of the frankest admissions in the classical tradition that impassibility creates a genuine pastoral problem.

Here is what Anselm wrote in Proslogion 8:

But again, how art thou at once compassionate and impassible? For if thou art impassible, thou canst not suffer with others, and if thou canst not suffer with others, thy heart is not wretched out of sympathy for the wretched—but this is what being compassionate means. Yet if thou art not compassionate, whence does such great consolation come to the wretched?

Notice what Anselm is doing here. He is stating the problem with striking clarity. The Latin word for "compassion" is compassio, and its root meaning is "suffering with" (com = with, passio = suffering). To be compassionate, literally, is to suffer alongside someone. But impassibility says God cannot suffer. So if God cannot suffer, He cannot com-passionate—He cannot "suffer with" the wretched. And if He cannot suffer with the wretched, how can He be compassionate? The logic seems airtight.

Anselm's solution, such as it is, runs as follows:

How is it, then, O Lord, that thou both art and art not compassionate? Art thou compassionate with respect to us, but not according to thy being? Yes, thou art compassionate according to our sense, but not according to thine. For when thou lookest upon us, wretched as we are, we feel the effect of thy compassion, but thou dost not feel emotion. So, then, thou art compassionate, because thou savest the wretched and sparest those who sin against thee, and yet thou art not compassionate, because thou art not affected by any share in our wretchedness.¹

This is a remarkable passage. Anselm is telling us that God's compassion is real in its effects—we genuinely experience consolation, help, and mercy from God. But God does not actually feel compassion internally. We feel the results of what looks like compassion, but God Himself does not experience the emotional state that we would call compassionate feeling. God acts compassionately toward us, and we experience His actions as compassion, but God does not actually have compassion as an inner emotional reality.

Several things are worth noting about Anselm's approach. First, Rob Lister observes that when Anselm says God does not "feel emotion," he is interpreting divine compassion through an anthropopathic lens—that is, treating the emotional language as a way of describing the effects God produces in us, rather than as a window into God's inner experience.² However, as Lister also notes, this does not necessarily mean that Anselm believed God was entirely devoid of any form of emotional experience whatsoever. It may be that Anselm was primarily trying to safeguard God's sovereign freedom and voluntary condescension. Wretched sinners have no claim on God's compassion. His mercy toward them is entirely unmerited and comes solely at His initiative. In freely choosing to rescue sinners, God does not thereby join them in being wretched and sinful.³

If this reading is correct, then Anselm may have left the door open for some form of divine emotional life that differs significantly from the creaturely emotional experience of wretchedness and sorrow. The problem, as Lister points out, is that Anselm never elaborated on this possibility. We are left having to interpret him by inference rather than by explicit statement.⁴

I find Anselm's passage deeply revealing, and I think it deserves more attention than it usually receives. Reading it carefully, one gets the sense of a man who is intellectually committed to impassibility but who finds it pastorally troubling. His opening question—"How art thou at once compassionate and impassible?"—has the ring of genuine puzzlement, not just a rhetorical device. And his solution—God is compassionate "according to our sense" but not "according to His own"—sounds more like a concession than a resolution. It is as though Anselm is saying: "I know what the doctrine requires me to affirm, but I am not entirely sure how to make it work."

From the perspective I am developing in this book, Anselm's paradox points to a genuine problem. If compassion literally means "suffering with," and if God cannot suffer, then God cannot literally be compassionate—only behaviorally so. We feel the effects of God's actions, but there is nobody "home" in the emotional sense. God is doing compassionate things, but He is not feeling compassionate. And I believe that for most ordinary Christians—and, I suspect, for Anselm himself—that answer feels incomplete. It is one thing to be told that God will act on your behalf. It is another thing entirely to be told that God feels for you in your suffering. The first provides practical help. The second provides emotional comfort. Both matter. And an impassible God, strictly speaking, can only offer the first.

It is worth noting that Anselm also maintained the standard patristic position regarding the incarnation: that suffering is properly attributed to Christ's human nature rather than to His divine nature.⁵ In this, Anselm was entirely in line with the mainstream tradition. The question of whether the divine nature itself could suffer—and what that might mean—would have to wait several more centuries for a theologian bold enough to press that issue more aggressively. His name was Martin Luther.

Thomas Aquinas: The God of Pure Act

If Anselm wrestled with the tension between impassibility and compassion in the manner of a prayerful monk, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) addressed it with the precision of a philosopher. Aquinas is widely regarded as the greatest theologian of the medieval period—and his treatment of divine impassibility is the most philosophically sophisticated and internally coherent version ever produced. It is also, in my judgment, the version that creates the most serious problems for understanding the God of the Bible.

To understand Aquinas's position on divine emotion, we need to first understand his broader metaphysical framework. Aquinas did not treat impassibility as a standalone doctrine. It was part of a tightly interlocking system that included divine simplicity, divine immutability, and the concept of God as actus purus—"pure act."⁶

Let me explain these ideas in plain language, because they are essential for understanding why Aquinas believed what he did about God's emotional life.

Pure Act and Potentiality

Aquinas adopted and adapted Aristotle's distinction between potentiality and actuality. Everything in the created world has both potentiality (what it could become) and actuality (what it is right now). An acorn has the potentiality to become an oak tree. A child has the potentiality to become an adult. A piece of clay has the potentiality to become a pot. Change, for Aristotle and Aquinas, is the movement from potentiality to actuality—from what something could be to what it is.

Now here is the crucial step: Aquinas argued that God has no potentiality whatsoever. God is actus purus—pure actuality, with nothing unrealized, nothing potential, nothing that He could become but is not yet. God is fully, completely, and eternally everything He is. There is no "becoming" in God. There is no moving from one state to another. There is no change.⁷

Why does this matter for emotions? Because emotions, on Aquinas's analysis, involve change. When I feel grief, I move from a state of non-grief to a state of grief. When I feel joy, I move from a state of non-joy to a state of joy. These are changes—movements from potentiality to actuality. And if God is pure act with no potentiality, then God cannot undergo these kinds of changes. He cannot move from one emotional state to another, because movement requires potentiality, and God has none.

Aquinas on Love, Joy, and the "Safe" Emotions

Aquinas did not, however, deny all emotional language about God. His approach was more nuanced—and more discriminating—than that. He made a careful distinction between different kinds of emotions based on whether they necessarily involved bodily change and imperfection.

In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas argued that emotions like love and joy, when stripped of their bodily and sensory components, can be properly attributed to God. This is because love and joy, in their intellectual (as opposed to sensory) forms, do not involve imperfection. God loves and rejoices, but He does so "without passion" (sine passione amat), as Aquinas put it.⁸ God's love is not an arousal, not a stirring, not a movement from one state to another. It is a pure, eternal act of willing the good for His creatures.

On the other hand, emotions like anger and sorrow inherently involve imperfection, in Aquinas's view. Anger involves a desire for retaliation that implies something has gone wrong. Sorrow involves pain over something that has happened against one's wishes. These cannot be attributed to God "except metaphorically, namely by a likeness in their effect" (nisi metaphorice propter similitudinem effectus).⁹ In other words, when Scripture says God is angry, it does not mean God actually feels anger. It means God acts in a way that resembles what an angry person would do—namely, He punishes.

Aquinas on Divine Mercy

Aquinas's treatment of divine mercy is particularly telling. The Latin word for mercy—misericordia—literally means "having a miserable heart" (miser = wretched, cor = heart). To be merciful, etymologically speaking, is to have your heart made wretched by someone else's suffering. But this, on Aquinas's view, is exactly what cannot happen to God. God cannot be made wretched. God cannot be emotionally disturbed by the suffering of another. And so God cannot, strictly speaking, be merciful in the sense of having His heart moved by our pain.

Aquinas stated this with characteristic directness: "To feel sad about another's misery is no attribute of God, but to drive it out is supremely his" (Tristari ergo de miseria alterius non competit Deo; sed repellere miseriam alterius hoc maxime ei competit).¹⁰ In other words, God does not join us in our sorrow. Instead, He acts to overcome it. God's mercy is not an emotional response to suffering but an active removal of suffering.¹¹

As Thomas Weinandy later summarized Aquinas's position: God's love is not a process by which He is aroused to desire the good and then comes to rejoice in it. Because God is pure act, there is no need for any arousal of His will. God does not need to become more passionate or more loving by actualizing some further potential. He eternally, perfectly, and fully loves—without any change, movement, or process.¹²

Assessing Aquinas

I want to be fair to Aquinas. His system has a remarkable internal consistency. If you accept his metaphysical starting points—God as pure act, divine simplicity, the Aristotelian framework of potentiality and actuality—then his conclusions about divine emotion follow logically. The system holds together. And Aquinas was not trying to make God cold or distant. He genuinely believed that God's love is more perfect, not less, for being unchanging and non-passive. In Aquinas's mind, an immovable love is a stronger love, not a weaker one.

But here is where I part company with Aquinas, and I believe many thoughtful readers will as well. The entire system depends on accepting his metaphysical framework—and that framework is, at bottom, an Aristotelian philosophical construct, not a biblical one. The Bible never describes God as actus purus. The Bible never teaches divine simplicity in Aquinas's technical sense. The Bible never suggests that emotions are problematic because they involve a movement from potentiality to actuality. These are philosophical concepts imported from Greek metaphysics and used to interpret (or, I would argue, to override) the biblical data.

As R. T. Mullins has argued, the classical theist's metaphysical framework creates a serious tension with the biblical portrayal of God, especially when it comes to emotions like wrath and compassion. If God cannot be affected by anything external to Himself, then it becomes very difficult to understand how God could have genuine wrath toward sin—because wrath, like compassion, seems to be a response to something in the world.¹³ We will explore Mullins's wrath argument in depth in Chapter 23, but for now it is enough to note that Aquinas's system, for all its internal elegance, sits in real tension with the pervasive biblical portrayal of a God who responds emotionally to His creatures.

It should also be noted that Aquinas did not treat impassibility as a formal, standalone attribute of God in either of his two Summae. As Weinandy has observed, his comments on impassibility appear in the context of discussing God's willing and loving, not as a separate topic.¹⁴ This is actually significant. It suggests that for Aquinas, impassibility was not an independent doctrine but a consequence of other doctrines—simplicity, immutability, pure actuality. Remove or modify those doctrines, and the strict form of impassibility loses its philosophical foundation.

Regarding the incarnation, Aquinas followed a Cyrillian understanding of the communication of attributes (communicatio idiomatum). He held that the properties of both Christ's human and divine natures are properly ascribed to the one person (the hypostasis), but not to each other. So it is correct to say "the Son of God suffered," because the person who suffered is indeed the Son of God. But it would be incorrect to say "the divine nature suffered," because suffering belongs to the human nature, not the divine.¹⁵ As Gerald Hanratty has rightly observed, for Aquinas, the cross reveals not a suffering God but an infinitely loving and merciful God who can overcome suffering and redeem us from sin and death.¹⁶

Lister's summary of the medieval period is helpful. Both Anselm and Aquinas, he argues, stayed close to the primary contours of the mainstream patristic doctrine of impassibility. They displayed a commitment to defending God's sovereign freedom and unconditionedness while also affirming an "anthropomorphically circumscribed yet no less 'real' category of divine emotion." But, Lister continues, both their formulations would benefit from an expanded grounding—one that does more to affirm positively what emotional content is true of God, rather than focusing primarily on what is not.¹⁷

I agree with Lister's assessment. The medieval treatment of divine impassibility represents a genuine intellectual achievement. But its dependence on Aristotelian metaphysics—a dependence that goes well beyond what the Church Fathers required—created a more rigid and philosophically determined version of the doctrine than the biblical evidence supports. The God of pure act is an impressive philosophical construct, but I am not at all sure He is the God of Genesis 6:6, Hosea 11:8, or John 11:35.

Martin Luther: The Theology of the Cross

When we cross from the medieval period into the Reformation, we encounter a dramatically different theological temperament. The Reformers—especially Martin Luther—were deeply suspicious of the philosophical constructs that dominated medieval theology. Luther in particular had little patience for Aristotle and even less for the elaborate metaphysical systems that Aquinas had built upon him.

It is in the person of the great Reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546) that we encounter the first major theologian in church history to depart significantly from the patristic consensus on divine impassibility.¹⁸ Despite his formal allegiance to the doctrine when considering God "in the abstract"—that is, apart from the incarnation—Luther's commitment to a "theology of the cross" (theologia crucis) led him to attribute suffering to God to a degree that was unprecedented in the Christian tradition.¹⁹

The Theology of the Cross

To understand Luther's contribution to the impassibility debate, we need to understand his fundamental theological method. Luther distinguished sharply between two approaches to knowing God: the "theology of glory" (theologia gloriae) and the "theology of the cross" (theologia crucis). The theology of glory tries to know God by reasoning upward from His works in creation and from philosophical principles about divine perfection, power, and majesty. The theology of the cross insists that God is truly known only in the suffering, weakness, and shame of Jesus Christ crucified.

As Dennis Ngien explains, Luther's theologia crucis holds that God's true identity can be known only in His saving relationship to us—specifically in the suffering and cross of Jesus Christ.²⁰ This was a radical shift in emphasis. Aquinas had reasoned from philosophical principles about pure actuality to conclusions about what God could and could not experience. Luther said: look at the cross. That is where God reveals who He really is. And what we see at the cross is not undisturbed bliss. We see agony, abandonment, and death.

Luther's Christology placed a very high premium on the unity of Christ's two natures—so much so, in fact, that some later critics accused him of blending the natures and leaning in the direction of monophysitism (the heresy that Christ had only one nature).²¹ Luther's concern here was primarily about salvation. He was certain that if the divine nature did not experience suffering and death in Christ, then sinners would be hopeless. As Luther himself declared:

We Christians must ascribe all the idiomata of the two natures of Christ, both persons, equally to him. Consequently Christ is God and man in one person, because whatever is said of man must also be said of him as God, namely, Christ has died, and Christ is God; therefore God died—not the separated God, but God united with humanity.²²

"God died" (drumb ist Gott gestorben). That sentence alone marks a dramatic shift from the careful philosophical distinctions of Aquinas. For Luther, the suffering of Christ was not merely something that happened to His human nature while His divine nature remained serenely unaffected. The person who suffered was the Son of God. And if the Son of God suffered, then in some genuine sense, God suffered.

Luther could be even more emphatic. In his Confession Concerning Christ's Supper, he warned against the hermeneutical move known as alloeosis—the practice of attributing statements about Christ's suffering exclusively to His human nature. Luther thundered:

Beware, beware, I say, of this alloeosis, for it is the devil's mask since it will finally construct a kind of Christ after whom I would not want to be a Christian, that is a Christ who is and does no more in his passion and his life than any other ordinary saint. For if I believe that only the human nature suffered for me, then Christ would be a poor Savior for me, in fact, he himself would need a Savior.²³

This is extraordinary language. Luther is saying that if we neatly separate Christ's suffering from His divinity—if we say that only the human nature suffered while the divine nature remained impassible—then the cross loses its saving power. A merely human sufferer cannot save us. We need a divine Savior who genuinely enters into the horror of the cross. Luther's soteriological conviction—that salvation depends on God Himself suffering for us—drove him to predicate suffering of the divine nature in a way that strained at the boundaries of the traditional formulation.

Luther and the Impassibility Tradition

Now, we need to be careful here. Luther did not formally and explicitly reject the doctrine of impassibility. He continued to presuppose what Ngien calls "God's eternal impassibility" prior to the incarnation.²⁴ And he repeatedly stressed that God's suffering is limited to the sphere of the incarnation—it is in the union of divine and human natures that God experiences suffering, not in God's abstract or eternal nature considered apart from the incarnation.²⁵

Nevertheless, Luther understood the divine nature to be subject to suffering and death in the incarnation in a way that virtually none of his predecessors had.²⁶ His Christology strained at the seams of paradox. He wanted to say both that the divine nature, considered in itself, is impassible, and that God genuinely suffered in Christ. The tension in Luther's thought is real, and scholars continue to debate how to resolve it.

It would be wrong, however, to turn Luther into a modern passibilist like Jürgen Moltmann. As Burnell Eckardt has shown, there is a great divergence between Luther and Moltmann, despite Moltmann's borrowing of Reformation terminology. For Luther, the cross is primarily about the transfer of Christ's righteousness to unrighteous sinners. For Moltmann, the cross is an event taking place within God—part of God's process of becoming. Luther saw the cross as an activity that has nothing to do with God's internal perfecting, since God is already perfect and complete. Moltmann, by contrast, sees the cross as the key element in God's process of being perfected.²⁷ Luther was also decidedly not a panentheist, unlike Moltmann.²⁸ We will examine Moltmann's theology more fully in Chapter 9.

In my judgment, Luther occupies a fascinating transitional position in the history of this debate. He did not reject impassibility outright, but his theology of the cross made it much harder to maintain in its strict medieval form. By insisting that God is revealed in suffering rather than in philosophical abstractions about perfection, Luther shifted the conversation's center of gravity. After Luther, you could still affirm impassibility—but you had to reckon with the cross in a way that Aquinas's elegant system of pure act never quite demanded. Luther planted the seeds. Others would eventually reap the harvest.

John Calvin: Divine Accommodation and Emotion

John Calvin (1509–1564) did not formally treat divine impassibility as a distinct attribute of God in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. His views on the matter emerge through his discussions of other doctrines, especially divine repentance and God's accommodated self-revelation.²⁹

Calvin's key concept was accommodation. He believed that God, in communicating with human beings through Scripture, "stoops down" to our level. God adjusts His speech to our limited capacity for understanding. In a famous and delightful image, Calvin compared God to a mother who "lisps" with her young children, using baby talk so they can understand her:

The Anthropomorphites, also, who dreamed of a corporeal God, because mouth, ears, eyes, hands, and feet are often ascribed to him in Scripture, are easily refuted. For who is so devoid of intellect as not to understand that God, in so speaking, lisps with us as nurses are wont to do with little children? Such modes of expression, therefore, do not so much express what kind of a being God is, as accommodate the knowledge of him to our feebleness. In doing so, he must of course stoop far below his proper height.³⁰

Calvin applied this principle of accommodation broadly. When Scripture describes God as "repenting," for instance, Calvin argued that this is not a literal description of a change in God's mind but an accommodation designed to help us understand God's actions in terms we can grasp. Calvin explained that we require this gracious condescension from God "because our weakness does not attain to his exalted state." Therefore, "the description of him that is given to us must be accommodated to our capacity so that we may understand it. Now the mode of accommodation is for him to represent himself to us not as he is in himself, but as he seems to us."³¹

Calvin's Ambiguity

Here is where Calvin becomes genuinely hard to pin down. On the one hand, he clearly used the accommodation principle to distance God from the emotional language of Scripture. He could speak of God's anger, for example, as being accommodated language rather than a description of God's actual inner experience. In some passages, Calvin appears to equate anger with the action of judgment and repentance with a mere change of outward action, effectively dissolving the emotional content into the divine will.³²

On the other hand, Calvin did not consistently eliminate all emotional content from his interpretation of God. In some passages, he unhesitatingly affirmed God's display of positive emotions such as love, compassion, and happiness.³³ And even with the so-called "negative" emotions, Calvin sometimes retained an affective dimension. In a very telling comment on Genesis 6:6, for example, Calvin specified that the description of God as grief-stricken was an accommodation designed to reveal God's "hatred and detestation of sin."³⁴ Notice what Calvin is doing here: he eliminates the element of surprised sorrow (since God, being omniscient, cannot be caught off guard), but he retains the affective dimension of God's hatred of sin. God may not grieve in the human sense of being blindsided by something unexpected, but He genuinely detests sin. That detestation is itself an emotional reality.

What, then, do we make of passages where Calvin seems to say flatly that God has no passions at all? In his comments on Hosea 11:8–9, for instance, and in a sermon on Ephesians 4:29–30, Calvin appears to state that there are no passions in God.³⁵ As Lister argues, Calvin is most likely referring to the specifically negative connotations of creaturely finitude and sinfulness that typically accompany human emotions. Calvin means that there are no passions in God that bear the human limitations and deficiencies generally associated with these emotions. He is not attempting to argue that God is entirely dispassionate.³⁶

Regarding the incarnation, Calvin, like Luther, affirmed the communicatio idiomatum (the communication of attributes between Christ's two natures).³⁷ But unlike Luther, Calvin was more cautious about predicating suffering of the divine nature. He believed, much like the patristic tradition, that God the Son suffered in His human but not His divine nature.³⁸ When the prophets use language suggesting God's distress—such as Isaiah 63:9—Calvin applied his accommodation method, arguing that God "assumes and applies to himself human passions" as a customary figure of speech, rather than actually enduring anguish in His divine nature.³⁹

I want to offer two observations about Calvin's legacy for the impassibility debate. First, Calvin's accommodation principle has been enormously influential. As Roberto Sirvent has noted, Calvin essentially provided impassibilists with the hermeneutical means to dismiss troubling passages of Scripture as mere accommodations—figurative concessions to human weakness that do not reveal anything about God's actual inner life.⁴⁰ If every passage describing God's emotions can be explained as accommodation, then the massive biblical evidence for divine emotion loses its force. The accommodation principle, taken to its extreme, becomes a blank check for reinterpreting any biblical text that does not fit one's theological system.

Second, however, Calvin's own practice suggests that the accommodation principle has limits. Calvin himself did not consistently dissolve all emotional content into mere accommodation. His retention of God's "hatred and detestation of sin" shows that he believed the accommodated language points to something genuinely real in God, even if it does not describe God's experience in exactly the same way it would describe human experience. In this, Calvin was closer to the analogical approach I am advocating in this book: the language is not univocal (exactly the same for God and humans), but it is not merely metaphorical either—it points to genuine realities in God's experience, even if those realities are experienced in a divine rather than a human way.

Calvin's position, in the end, is ambiguous. And that ambiguity may be its most honest feature. Calvin sensed—as Anselm had before him and as many theologians would after him—that the impassibility question does not admit of easy answers. The biblical data pulls in one direction; the philosophical tradition pulls in another. Calvin tried to honor both. Whether he succeeded is a question that his theological heirs continue to debate.

Stephen Charnock: The Puritan Defense of Impassibility

The reflections of Puritan theologian Stephen Charnock (1628–1680) on divine impassibility are among the most extensive of the post-Reformation period. In his massive work The Existence and Attributes of God—one of the great classics of Reformed theology—Charnock took up the theme of God's impassibility under the larger heading of divine immutability. His treatment represents perhaps the most developed form of Protestant impassibility in the entire tradition.⁴¹

Charnock's argument rested on two intertwined foundations, both of which we have seen before: (1) the principle of accommodated revelation, and (2) the identification of creaturely limitations in human emotions that cannot be attributed to God.⁴²

On the first point, Charnock argued that God allowed for the depiction of Himself as repenting or grieving in Scripture in order to accommodate Himself "to our weak capacity." Charnock elaborated at considerable length:

Because he is said to have anger and repentance, we must not conclude him to have passions like us. When we cannot fully comprehend him as he is, he clothes himself with our nature in his expressions that we may apprehend him as we are able, and by inspection into ourselves, learn something of the nature of God; yet those human ways of speaking ought to be understood in a manner agreeable to the infinite excellency and majesty of God, and are only designed to mark out something in God which hath a resemblance with something in us; as we cannot speak to God as gods, but as men, so we cannot understand him speaking to us as a God, unless he condescend to speak to us like a man.⁴³

Charnock's second point focused on the limitations inherent in human emotions that cannot apply to God. Human repentance, for instance, stems from either ignorance of the future or an error in judgment. But "God is so wise that he cannot err, so holy that he cannot do evil; and his certain prescience, or foreknowledge, secures him against any unexpected events." Charnock continued: "God doth not act but upon clear and infallible reason; and a change upon passion is accounted by all so great a weakness in man, that none can entertain so unworthy a conceit of God."⁴⁴ Similarly, grief is inconsistent with God's perfect blessedness: "repentance is inconsistent with infallible foresight, so is grief no less inconsistent with undefiled blessedness."⁴⁵

This is an important move, and it deserves careful attention. Charnock is not simply saying "God has no emotions—case closed." He is identifying specific features of human emotional experience—surprise, ignorance, error, weakness, involuntary reaction—and arguing that these features cannot apply to God. He is affirming that as a "pure Spirit," God "is not capable of those passions which are signs of weakness and impotence."⁴⁶ Notice the qualifier: "those passions which are signs of weakness." This implies that there might be other affective states that are not signs of weakness—and these might still apply to God.

Charnock's Telling Admissions

And indeed, like Calvin before him, Charnock tucked some very telling comments into his analysis. When discussing Genesis 6:6, Charnock explained that the description of God as repenting was intended to portray "only a change of [God's] outward conduct" with His creatures.⁴⁷ This suggests that Charnock was inclined to shift the emotional terminology into volitional categories—interpreting "God repented" as meaning "God changed His outward actions," not "God felt sorry."

But that is not all Charnock said. In the same analysis, he observed that the language of divine repentance "is a word suited to our capacities to signify his detestation of sin, and his resolution to punish it."⁴⁸ This is significant. "Detestation" is not a volitional category—it is an affective one. To detest something is not merely to decide to act against it; it is to feel revulsion toward it. Charnock, like Calvin, retained an element of genuine emotional response in God even while officially defending impassibility.

Furthermore, elsewhere in his work, Charnock spoke of God's love toward His people as "his affection to them"⁴⁹—language that is difficult to interpret as purely volitional. If God has "affection" toward His people, then God has something more than a bare decision to act benevolently. He has a felt orientation of warmth and care toward them.

Lister's assessment is instructive: Charnock's affirmation of divine impassibility did not lead him to the conclusion that God is entirely dispassionate, even when "negative" emotions are in view. Charnock employed an analogical interpretation of anthropopathic language in which certain human characteristics—such as being surprised or making errors in judgment—do not apply to God. This interpretive move resulted in shifting some affective content into volitional categories, but it did not commit him to the concept of a passionless deity.⁵⁰

I find this pattern fascinating—and highly significant for the argument of this book. Even the most rigorous defenders of impassibility, when they got down to the details of actually interpreting Scripture, could not bring themselves to eliminate all emotional content from God. Charnock wanted to deny that God has "passions" in the sense of involuntary, irrational, creaturely disturbances. And on that point, I wholeheartedly agree with him. But when he interpreted what the biblical language does mean, he kept reaching for affective categories—detestation, affection—that go beyond bare acts of the will. The biblical text kept pulling him back toward a God who genuinely feels, even as his theological system kept pushing him toward a God who merely acts.

The Reformed Confessions: "Without Body, Parts, or Passions"

No discussion of impassibility in the Reformation tradition would be complete without examining the confessional statements that enshrined this doctrine in official Protestant theology. Two confessional documents are particularly important: the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (1571) and the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646).

Article 1 of the Anglican Articles of Religion declares: "There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible."⁵¹

The Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 2, Paragraph 1, echoes this language almost exactly: "There is but one only, living, and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions; immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute."⁵²

The phrase "without body, parts, or passions" is directly drawn from the impassibility tradition. God has no body (He is incorporeal), no parts (He is simple), and no passions (He is impassible). This confession has been enormously influential in Reformed theology and continues to shape evangelical discussions about God's emotional life today.

But here is the crucial question: what exactly does "without passions" mean? This is not as obvious as it might seem, and Reformed theologians have debated it for centuries.

One reading—the strict reading—takes "without passions" to mean that God has no emotional life whatsoever. God does not feel. God does not have affective states. God is, in the philosophical sense, entirely apathetic (from apatheia—without feeling). On this reading, the Confession aligns with the strictest forms of classical impassibility.

A second reading—the qualified reading—takes "without passions" to mean that God is not subject to involuntary, irrational, uncontrolled passions. On this reading, the Confession is using "passions" in the older, technical sense we explored in Chapter 2: pathē, involuntary bodily and emotional disturbances that happen to you against your will. God does not have those. But God does have genuine affections—voluntary, rational, purposeful emotional responses that flow from His character and are always under His sovereign control. On this reading, the Confession is not denying that God feels; it is denying that God is emotionally out of control.

As Jesse Morrell has observed, some contemporary Calvinists who affirm divine emotions try to redefine the meaning of "impassibility" to include genuine feelings, arguing that the Westminster divines did not mean that God is entirely without emotion—only that God does not experience emotions in the flawed, uncontrolled way that human beings do.⁵³ Morrell argues that this amounts to a redefinition of the term, since impassibility literally means "without passions." Whether he is right that this constitutes a departure from what the original framers intended, or whether the framers themselves already distinguished between "passions" and "affections" (as much of the evidence from the Reformed tradition suggests), remains a matter of ongoing scholarly debate.

The historical evidence suggests that many of the post-Reformation Reformed theologians did in fact draw a technical distinction between passions (viewed negatively as involuntary and impermanent) and affections (viewed positively as voluntary). As Richard Muller has documented, this distinction was widespread in Reformed orthodoxy.⁵⁴ If this distinction was in the minds of the Westminster divines—as seems plausible given the intellectual context in which they worked—then "without passions" may well have meant "without involuntary, irrational, destabilizing passions," not "without any affective life whatsoever."

It is also worth noting the striking tension within the Westminster Confession itself. In the very same paragraph that declares God to be "without passions," the Confession goes on to describe God as "most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth" and "hating all sin." How can a God who is "without passions" also be "most loving" and "hating all sin"? If love and hatred are not emotional states, what are they? If they are mere acts of the will with no affective content, can God truly be said to be "most loving" in any meaningful sense?⁵⁵

I believe the internal tension in the Westminster Confession reveals the same fundamental difficulty we have seen throughout this chapter: the impassibility tradition has always struggled to deny God "passions" while simultaneously affirming that God loves, hates, shows mercy, and exercises long-suffering patience. The Confession's own language resists the strict reading. A God who is "most loving," "gracious," "merciful," and "long-suffering" is a God who, at the very least, has something more than a bare rational judgment about the good. He has affective engagement with His creatures—He cares, and His caring has emotional depth.

Muller's conclusion about the Reformed tradition is worth attending to carefully. He argues that the Reformed interpretation of the divine affections was driven not by an alien metaphysical structure but by a consistent concern for how God relates to the human race. The method was not the direct imposition of a philosophical principle of transcendence onto a biblical text, but rather a theological synthesis drawing on the analogy of faith (analogia fidei) and the principle that Scripture interprets Scripture (scriptura sui interpres).⁵⁶ This is a fair point. The Reformed theologians were not simply parroting Aristotle. They were wrestling with the biblical text and trying to read it coherently. But, as I will argue throughout this book, their reading sometimes failed to do full justice to the weight and breadth of the biblical evidence for genuine divine emotion.

Assessment: Where the Tradition Stands at the End of the Reformation

As we step back and look at the trajectory from the Middle Ages through the Reformation, several important patterns emerge.

Continuity with the Fathers

First, there is striking continuity. From Anselm to Charnock, the mainstream tradition affirmed what we might call a "dual commitment"—a simultaneous affirmation of divine impassibility and divine passion. God is impassible: He cannot be involuntarily disturbed, surprised, or destabilized. But God is also passionate: He loves, hates sin, acts mercifully, and exercises patient long-suffering. The theologians we have examined in this chapter all tried to hold these two commitments together, just as the Church Fathers had before them.

Increasing Philosophical Rigor

Second, the medieval period brought a significant increase in philosophical precision and rigor. Aquinas's system of pure act, divine simplicity, and the Aristotelian framework of potentiality and actuality gave the impassibility tradition its most sophisticated philosophical foundation. But this philosophical rigor came at a cost. It made the doctrine more rigid, more dependent on a particular metaphysical framework, and harder to reconcile with the emotional richness of the biblical text. The qualified, sometimes awkward, pastorally sensitive impassibility of the Fathers became the philosophically precise, internally coherent, but emotionally austere impassibility of Aquinas.

The Lutheran Crack in the Wall

Third—and most importantly for the story we are telling—Luther introduced a genuine disruption. His theology of the cross, with its insistence that God is revealed in suffering rather than in abstract perfection, created a crack in the impassibility tradition that would eventually widen into a chasm. Luther did not abandon impassibility outright. But he shifted the terms of the debate by insisting that the cross—not Aristotelian metaphysics—is the primary lens through which we know God. And the God revealed at the cross is not a God of undisturbed bliss. He is a God who enters into the agony, abandonment, and death of His Son.

As the author of this book, I find Luther's instinct profoundly right, even if his precise formulation remains debated. The cross must be central to our understanding of God's emotional life. A theological system that can maintain God's impassibility only by keeping the cross at arm's length—only by insisting that what happened at Calvary tells us about Christ's human nature but reveals nothing about God's own inner experience—has, in my judgment, missed the deepest meaning of the crucifixion. The cross reveals who God is. And who God is, is a God who suffers with and for His creatures (see Chapter 26 for the full treatment of the cross and divine suffering).

Calvin's Ambiguous Legacy

Fourth, Calvin's accommodation principle left a genuinely ambiguous legacy. On the one hand, it provided a powerful tool for maintaining impassibility by explaining away the emotional language of Scripture as mere divine "baby talk." On the other hand, Calvin's own interpretive practice showed that accommodation does not necessarily empty the emotional language of all genuine content. God's "hatred and detestation of sin" is not a mere figure of speech, even on Calvin's reading. It points to something genuinely real in God. The accommodation principle, properly understood, tells us that the biblical language about God's emotions is analogical—similar but not identical to human experience—not that it is empty or purely figurative. This is precisely the approach I am advocating in this book (see Chapter 6 for the full treatment of the anthropomorphism objection).

The Persistent Pattern

Fifth, and perhaps most revealingly, we see a persistent pattern across all the thinkers in this chapter: even the most rigorous defenders of impassibility could not bring themselves to deny all emotional content to God. Anselm preserved the effects of divine compassion. Aquinas attributed love and joy to God as acts of the intellectual appetite. Calvin retained God's "hatred and detestation of sin." Charnock spoke of God's "detestation" and "affection." The Reformers distinguished between "passions" (denied of God) and "affections" (affirmed of God). In every case, the raw material of the biblical text kept pulling these theologians back toward a God who genuinely feels—even as their philosophical commitments kept pushing them toward a God who merely acts.

Lister's summary of Calvin and Charnock captures this pattern well: both were more helpful in clarifying the ways in which divine emotion differs from human emotion than they were in identifying features of continuity. Their analogical hermeneutic excelled at telling us what God's emotions are not like (not involuntary, not irrational, not dependent on ignorance, not born of weakness), but it often fell short in telling us what God's emotions are like. We still need to know: when the Bible says God is angry, what does that mean for God's actual experience? If it is not mere metaphor, and it is not exactly like human anger, then what is it?⁵⁷

As Lister notes, both Calvin and Charnock were prone to shift "negative" emotional terminology into categories of volition—treating anger as a decision to punish, grief as a decision to change one's outward actions, and so on. But just because God's emotions are always voluntary, rational, and purposeful does not mean they are only volitional. A father who punishes his rebellious teenager out of love may do so voluntarily and purposefully—but his heart still aches. The act of punishment is volitional. The ache is affective. Both are real, and both matter. Calvin and Charnock tended to collapse the affective into the volitional. I believe they were right to affirm the volitional dimension but wrong to reduce the emotional to it.⁵⁸

Seeds of the Coming Revolution

As we close this chapter and prepare to turn to the modern era in Chapter 9, it is worth identifying the specific elements from this period that would contribute to the dramatic theological revolution that was about to unfold.

Luther's theology of the cross planted the most important seed. By insisting that the cross reveals God's true nature, Luther made it possible—perhaps inevitable—for later theologians to ask: if God is truly revealed in suffering, does that not tell us something about who God eternally is? Luther himself answered cautiously, limiting divine suffering to the incarnation. But his theological heirs, especially Moltmann, would push the question much further.

The persistent failure of the impassibility tradition to fully account for the biblical data also planted seeds. From Anselm's prayer of frustration to the Westminster Confession's internal tension, the tradition kept bumping up against the stubborn fact that the Bible describes God in irreducibly emotional terms. You can explain away one passage. You can accommodate ten passages. But when you are dealing with hundreds of passages across every genre, every author, and every period of biblical history—all consistently describing a God who loves, grieves, rejoices, burns with anger, and weeps with compassion—the "it's all accommodation" explanation starts to creak under its own weight.

The distinction between "passions" and "affections" also planted seeds, though not in the direction the Reformers intended. By conceding that God can have "affections" (voluntary, rational emotional responses) even while denying God "passions" (involuntary, irrational disturbances), the Reformed tradition created conceptual space for a version of divine emotion that was genuinely emotional and not merely volitional. All that was needed was for someone to argue that the "affections" were more robust, more responsive, and more emotionally rich than the tradition had allowed. That argument would come in the modern period.

Finally, the Aristotelian metaphysical framework that undergirded the strictest forms of impassibility—Aquinas's system of pure act and potentiality—would face increasing criticism as modern theology grew less deferential to Greek philosophical categories. Once theologians began to question whether the God of the Bible should be understood through the lens of Aristotelian metaphysics, the philosophical foundation for strict impassibility began to erode.

The stage was set. The next chapter will tell the story of how, in the modern period, the ancient doctrine of divine impassibility underwent one of the most dramatic theological reversals in the history of Christianity. It is a story of wars, suffering, philosophical upheaval, and a rediscovery of the passionate, feeling, grieving God of the Hebrew prophets.