Part III: A Brief History of the Debate

Chapter 9

The Modern Revolution

How Theology Rediscovered the Suffering God

Something remarkable happened in theology during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For well over a thousand years, the vast majority of Christian theologians agreed on a fundamental point about God: He is impassible — unable to suffer, unmoved by creaturely actions, eternally existing in undisturbed bliss. From the great Church Fathers we surveyed in Chapter 7, through the medieval giants and Reformers we traced in Chapter 8, the doctrine of divine impassibility stood as one of the most stable features of Christian theology. It was not debated. It was not questioned. It was simply assumed.

And then, within roughly a century, it all came crashing down.

Beginning in the mid-1800s and accelerating dramatically after the two World Wars, theology underwent one of the most stunning reversals in its entire history. The once-untouchable doctrine of divine impassibility went from near-unanimous acceptance to near-unanimous rejection among mainline and academic theologians. By the late twentieth century, the rejection of impassibility had become so widespread that scholars could speak of it as the "new orthodoxy." R. T. Mullins notes that in 1900, Marshall Randles predicted this modern rejection of divine impassibility was merely a passing mood that would come and go. The prediction turned out to be deeply mistaken. Far from fading away, the doctrine of divine passibility — the belief that God genuinely suffers and is genuinely affected by His creatures — became the dominant position in modern theology.¹

What happened? How did the theological landscape shift so dramatically and so quickly? That is what this chapter sets out to explore.

I want to be honest with you right from the start about where I stand. I believe the modern passibilist revolution was largely right. God genuinely feels. He genuinely suffers. He is genuinely affected by what happens to His creatures. The old picture of a God sitting in undisturbed bliss while His children scream in pain was never a faithful portrait of the God revealed in Scripture. But — and this is an important "but" — I also believe some passibilist thinkers went too far. Some made suffering essential to God's very nature, as though God needed a world to suffer in order to be fully God. Others blurred the line between divine and human suffering in ways that compromised God's sovereignty. Still others flirted with ancient heresies that the Church rightly condemned centuries ago. The truth, as we will see, lies in a mediating position that affirms the core insight of the passibilist revolution while avoiding its excesses.

To understand how we got here, we need to trace the story carefully. We will look at the cultural, philosophical, and theological forces that drove this revolution. We will meet the key thinkers who led it. And we will examine the five main arguments that modern passibilists put forward for rejecting impassibility. Along the way, we will begin to see why a mediating position — one that takes both the tradition and the revolution seriously — offers the most faithful path forward.

The Scope of the Shift

Before we dive into the details, we need to appreciate just how dramatic this shift was. Rob Lister opens his survey of modern passibilism with a collection of representative quotations that capture the spirit of the revolution. By the late twentieth century, major theologians were making statements like these: "Theology has no falser idea than that of the impassibility of God." And: "Perhaps the least popular of the traditional theistic canon, the most likely to fade away, is the tenet that God is impassible." And: "Impassibility is the most dubious of the divine attributes discussed in classical theism." Marcel Sarot observed that "by now the rejection of the ancient doctrine of divine impassibility has so much become a theological commonplace, that many theologians do not even feel the need to argue for it."²

Think about what those quotations represent. A doctrine that was affirmed by nearly every major theologian from the second century through the eighteenth century — a doctrine embedded in the ecumenical creeds, the Reformed confessions, and the great systematic theologies of the tradition — was now being dismissed as theology's "falsest idea." That is an extraordinary reversal.

One interesting feature of this shift, as Mullins points out, is how it cut across theological boundaries. Divine passibility became common ground between otherwise diverse theological movements: process theism, liberation theology, ecofeminism, open theism, and even some strands of Reformed theology. Groups that could agree on almost nothing else could agree that God suffers.³ That tells us something about the power of the passibilist intuition. It resonated across traditions because it seemed to capture something deeply biblical and profoundly pastoral — something that the old impassibility framework struggled to express.

J. D. Kim provides a helpful overview of how this movement developed historically. The new trajectory of passibilist thought was evident as early as the 1850s in both British and German theological circles. Michael Brierley has identified fifty British passibilists who were engaged in discourse about the passibility of God during this period. At the same time, German theologians like Gottfried Thomasius were reconstructing Christology in ways that focused on the self-limitation of the Son and attended to His passibility.⁴ These conversations in Britain and Germany reinvigorated a largely neglected idea — that God might actually feel something when He encounters our suffering.

By the early twentieth century, the passibilist movement had picked up enormous momentum. A stream of influential scholars published robust works on divine passibility, including the Russian theologian Nicolas Berdyaev, the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, the Japanese Lutheran theologian Kazoh Kitamori, the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, the North Korean theologian Jung Young Lee, and the African American theologian James Cone.⁵ The diversity of these voices — spanning continents, cultures, and theological traditions — reveals how deeply the passibilist insight resonated with the Christian experience worldwide.

Not everyone was persuaded, of course. Impassibilists pushed back at every stage. Marshall Randles published a defense of divine impassibility in 1900, warning that the advocacy of divine passibility was "a new departure in a wrong direction, and fraught with peril to practical Christianity." Robert Mackintosh, in his 1920 survey of atonement theories, criticized the passibilist agenda with the striking objection: "An unhappy God would mean a bankrupt universe, a demonstrated pessimism, a doomed faith."⁶ In 1924, the Archbishops' Doctrinal Commission of the Church of England even assigned John Mozley to investigate the rising passibilist movement — a sign of just how seriously the ecclesiastical establishment took this theological challenge.⁷

Meanwhile, many Reformed theologians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — William Shedd, Herman Bavinck, Louis Berkhof, Charles Hodge — simply accepted the traditional presupposition of divine impassibility without much critical engagement. They dismissed passibilism without seriously wrestling with its arguments, because impassibility was already assumed in their understanding of the doctrine of God.⁸ It was only in the late twentieth century that impassibilists began paying more systematic attention to and engaging in genuine theological debate with the passibilist movement, rather than simply dismissing it as untenable.

The Forces Behind the Revolution

What drove this dramatic shift? Several powerful forces converged to make the old impassibility consensus seem untenable to an increasingly large number of theologians. Let me walk through the most important ones.

The Two World Wars and the Holocaust

Perhaps the single most powerful catalyst for the passibilist revolution was the unprecedented scale of human suffering in the twentieth century. The two World Wars, the Holocaust, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Armenian genocide — these events confronted theology with suffering on a scale that previous generations could scarcely have imagined. Millions of innocent people, including millions of children, were slaughtered in ways that defied comprehension.

In the face of such horrors, the doctrine of an unaffected, undisturbed God seemed not just abstract but morally obscene. Thomas Weinandy acknowledges that cultural factors — including the demise of nineteenth-century optimism and the social suffering caused by the Industrial Revolution and World War I — significantly influenced the movement toward passibilism.⁹ But it was the Holocaust above all that forced the question with brutal clarity: Can we worship a God who watched Auschwitz from a state of perfect bliss? Can we tell a mother whose children were marched into the gas chambers that God observed their suffering without being affected in any way? For a growing number of theologians, the answer was no.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian who was himself executed by the Nazis in April 1945, wrote from his prison cell some of the most powerful modern statements about the suffering of God. In his Letters and Papers from Prison, Bonhoeffer penned the now-famous declaration: "Only the suffering God can help."¹⁰ That simple sentence struck like a thunderbolt. Bonhoeffer was not making a detached philosophical argument. He was writing from a prison cell, awaiting execution, surrounded by the most horrific suffering the modern world had ever seen. And his conclusion was devastating in its simplicity: the God of the philosophers — undisturbed, unmoved, serene in His perfection — cannot help people who are being destroyed. Only a God who enters into suffering, who feels it from the inside, who is genuinely moved by the agony of His creatures — only that God can offer real comfort and real help.

Bonhoeffer went even further, suggesting that "God lets himself be pushed out of the world onto the cross." This is a startling image — God not as the almighty ruler who controls everything from above, but as the vulnerable One who allows Himself to be expelled, rejected, and crucified. For Bonhoeffer, the weakness of God on the cross is not a temporary disguise masking eternal power. It is a genuine revelation of who God is — a God who enters the suffering of the world rather than observing it from a safe distance.¹¹

The Influence of Hegel

The philosophical groundwork for the passibilist revolution was laid well before the World Wars, primarily through the influence of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). To understand Hegel's importance, we need a bit of philosophical context.

The older metaphysics that shaped classical theism was built on an "ontology of being" — a way of understanding reality that emphasized permanence, stability, and unchanging perfection. God, on this view, is pure being — complete, perfect, and utterly unchanging. This is the metaphysical backdrop for impassibility: if God is pure, unchanging being, then He cannot undergo any change, including emotional change.

Hegel offered a radically different picture. In Hegel's philosophical system, the Absolute Spirit (his term for ultimate reality, which many theologians read as "God") does not exist in static perfection. Instead, the Absolute Spirit develops through history — moving through a process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Crucially, this development includes moments of negation, suffering, and contradiction. For Hegel, suffering and negation are not deficiencies to be avoided. They are necessary moments in the unfolding of ultimate reality.

Lister observes that the impact of this new philosophical framework on theology was enormous. Richard Muller summarizes it well: "In the nineteenth century, under the impact of Immanuel Kant's critique of traditional rationalistic metaphysics, a new perspective on philosophy was developed by Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling according to which the older ontology of immutable being was replaced by an ontology of becoming." The effect, Muller notes, was to reshape the entire theological landscape.¹²

Hegel's influence on subsequent theology was immense. His dialectical method of thinking — in which truth emerges through the clash of opposites — shaped the thought of Kierkegaard, Barth, Moltmann, and countless others. The Hegelian influence is especially visible in Moltmann's theology of the cross, where God is revealed precisely in His opposite — in godlessness, abandonment, and suffering.¹³ We will explore Moltmann's contribution more fully below.

Now, I want to be clear: the fact that modern passibilism drew on Hegelian philosophy does not automatically make it wrong. Good theology has always drawn on philosophical resources — as we saw in Chapters 7 and 8, classical theism drew heavily on Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. The question is not whether philosophy was used, but whether the resulting theology is faithful to Scripture. However, we should be honest about the philosophical influences at work in the passibilist revolution, just as we need to be honest about the philosophical influences behind classical impassibility. Lister is right to point out that some passibilists who loudly accuse impassibilists of relying on "Greek philosophy" are themselves deeply indebted to modern philosophical influences — particularly Hegelianism.¹⁴

The Rediscovery of the Prophets and Biblical Scholarship

Another major force behind the passibilist revolution was the fresh reading of the Hebrew Bible — particularly the prophetic literature — that emerged in the twentieth century. The single most influential figure here was Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972), the Polish-born Jewish rabbi, philosopher, and theologian whose monumental work The Prophets (1962) reshaped how an entire generation of theologians understood the God of the Old Testament.

Heschel's central concept was "divine pathos" (pathos is a Greek word meaning suffering, feeling, or emotional experience). Heschel argued that the God of the Hebrew prophets is not the unmoved mover of Greek philosophy — not a self-contained, self-sufficient deity who gazes upon the world with utter detachment. Instead, the God of the prophets is passionately involved with His creation. He is "moved" and "stirred" by human actions. He grieves over injustice, burns with anger at oppression, and weeps over the suffering of His people. Heschel described this as the "divine pathos" — God's deep emotional engagement with the human situation.¹⁵

For Heschel, the prophets were not merely messengers who delivered God's words. They were people who entered into God's own emotional experience. They felt what God felt. When Jeremiah wept, he was weeping God's tears. When Hosea raged, he was channeling God's wounded love. The prophetic experience, on Heschel's reading, was an experience of "divine pathos" — a participation in the emotions of a God who is anything but unmoved.

The influence of Heschel's work cannot be overstated. It provided a powerful biblical counterweight to the philosophical tradition of impassibility. Where the philosophers described a God of pure thought and undisturbed perfection, Heschel described a God of passionate concern and emotional vulnerability. And his argument carried enormous weight precisely because it was grounded in careful exegesis of the Hebrew prophets — texts that the Christian tradition also regards as the inspired Word of God.

Beyond Heschel, the rise of historical criticism and modern biblical scholarship more broadly led to a fresh appreciation of just how pervasively emotional the biblical God is. As scholars studied the Bible with fresh eyes — freed from the assumption that every emotional description of God must be "merely anthropomorphic" (a question we address in depth in Chapter 6) — they noticed something striking. The God of the Bible is not the impassible God of the philosophical tradition. He grieves, rejoices, burns with anger, aches with compassion, and weeps over His wayward children. Over four hundred passages of Scripture describe God's emotional engagement with His creatures. As scholars gave these texts their full weight, the case for impassibility looked increasingly difficult to sustain on biblical grounds.¹⁶

The Shift from Transcendence to Immanence

Kim identifies yet another significant factor: a broader theological shift in emphasis from God's transcendence to His immanence. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the rise of several movements that highlighted God's closeness to and involvement in the world — natural evolution, theories of human progress, religious liberalism, the social gospel movement, and various forms of pantheism paired with naturalism. Charles Hopkins observes that the doctrine of God's immanence "assumed the divine presence in nature and in human society, broke down traditional distinctions between sacred and secular, and regarded Christianity as a natural religion."¹⁷

This growing attention to the immanence of God inevitably challenged traditional ideas regarding the metaphysical attributes of God — omnipotence, immutability, impassibility, sovereignty, eternity, and omniscience. If God is truly present within the world, intimately involved in the unfolding of history, then the picture of a God who is utterly unaffected by what happens in that world becomes harder to maintain. Of course, the emphasis on divine immanence can be taken too far — as it was in process theology (see Chapter 5) and various forms of pantheism. But the basic insight that God is not merely "up there" in undisturbed perfection but genuinely "down here" in the thick of creaturely life — that insight has deep biblical roots and played a significant role in the passibilist revolution.

Developments in Atonement Theology and Christology

Kim also traces the origins of the passibilist movement to developments in the interpretation of Christ's suffering and the atonement. From the early to mid-nineteenth century, the discussion of the passibility of the person of Jesus Christ gave rise to broader consideration of the passibility of God. Traditionally, the suffering of Christ on the cross was attributed solely to His human nature — the divine nature, being impassible, could not suffer. But a growing number of theologians began to push beyond this traditional account. They began attending to the suffering of Jesus Christ in both His human and His divine natures and were driven by new perspectives on theories of the atonement and on the connection between the cross and the eternal nature of God.¹⁸

This raises a profound question that we will examine in depth in Chapter 26: If Jesus Christ is truly God incarnate — if the person who hangs on the cross is the eternal Son of God — then did God suffer on the cross? The classical answer was carefully nuanced: the Son suffered in His human nature but not in His divine nature. But for many modern theologians, this seemed like a dodge. If the person on the cross is God the Son, then in some meaningful sense, God suffered. And if God suffered on the cross, then impassibility — at least in its strictest form — cannot be true.

The Key Modern Passibilist Voices

Now that we have surveyed the broader forces behind the shift, let us meet some of the individual thinkers who shaped the passibilist revolution most powerfully. Each brought a unique perspective, and together they built a case for divine suffering that reshaped the theological landscape.

Jürgen Moltmann and The Crucified God

No single theologian did more to popularize the idea of a suffering God in the twentieth century than the German Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann (born 1926). His groundbreaking 1974 work, The Crucified God, became the most influential modern treatment of divine suffering and remains essential reading for anyone engaging with this debate.

Moltmann's central argument is breathtaking in its ambition. He contends that the cross of Christ is not merely something that happened to the human nature of Jesus. It is an event within the life of God Himself — an event within the Trinity. At the cross, the Father suffers the death of the Son. The Son suffers abandonment by the Father. And the Holy Spirit proceeds from this mutual suffering of love. The cross, in other words, is not merely a human tragedy. It is a divine event — the central event in the life of the triune God.

As the Schmutzer volume records, Moltmann himself framed his central question this way: "Is God the transcendent and untouched stage manager of the theater of this violent world, or is God in Christ the central engaged figure of the world's tragedy?" For Moltmann, the answer is clear: God in Christ is the engaged figure, touched by human tragedy and present in it.¹⁹

Moltmann explicitly rejects what he calls the "metaphysical apathy axiom" — the philosophical assumption that God cannot be affected by anything outside Himself. Instead, he affirms "the passion of the passionate God." For Moltmann, a God incapable of suffering is a God incapable of love. Yet Moltmann is not a patripassianist — he does not claim that the Father died on the cross. Rather, the Father and the Son suffer in different ways. As Moltmann puts it, "Jesus experienced ultimate abandonment and the Father ultimate bereavement." The cross is an intra-Trinitarian event in which the Son suffers dying and the Father suffers the death of the Son.²⁰

Crucially, Moltmann insists that God's passibility is not a helpless, passive suffering but an "active suffering, which involves the willingness to open oneself to be touched, moved, affected by others — that means the suffering of passionate love."²¹ This distinction is important. Moltmann is not saying that God is a helpless victim of circumstances. He is saying that God freely chooses to be affected by the world out of love — and this free, sovereign choice to suffer is at the heart of who God is.

Moltmann's argument is powerful, and I find much in it that rings true. He takes the cross with radical seriousness as a revelation of God's character. He refuses to treat the crucifixion as merely a legal transaction that left God Himself unaffected. And he insists that the God revealed in the suffering of Christ is the true God — not a God who hides behind philosophical abstractions about divine perfection.

But Moltmann also goes too far in several respects, and we need to be honest about these problems. First, Moltmann tends to make suffering constitutive of God's eternal nature — as though God needs a world to suffer in order to be fully God. Drawing heavily on Hegel's dialectical philosophy, Moltmann applies Rahner's Rule (the principle that the "economic Trinity" — God as He reveals Himself in salvation history — is the "immanent Trinity" — God as He is in Himself) in a way that makes the cross not just a revelation of God but the very event that constitutes God's Trinitarian identity. The cross, for Moltmann, is "the central constituting feature of God's eternal Trinitarian life."²² This is deeply problematic. If the cross constitutes God's identity, then God depends on creation — He cannot be God without a world to suffer in. This compromises God's aseity (His self-sufficiency) and implies that creation was necessary rather than free. As Peter Vande Brake observes, on Moltmann's view, "God is not free not to create."²³

Second, while Moltmann denies being a patripassianist (one who teaches that the Father was crucified), his language sometimes blurs the lines uncomfortably. He speaks of the Father "suffering the death of the Son" in ways that make it difficult to maintain a clear distinction between the persons of the Trinity. Lister notes that Moltmann's Trinitarian theology of the cross, while powerful, raises questions about whether he has adequately protected the distinctness of the divine persons.²⁴

Third, as Lister and others have pointed out, Moltmann's emphasis on God's suffering solidarity can actually diminish the significance of the cross. Whereas the classical view sees the cross in relation to the achievement of victory over sin, Moltmann tends to see the cross primarily as a sign of God's suffering solidarity — God standing with us in our pain. That is beautiful and true as far as it goes, but if we lose the cross as the decisive victory over sin and death, we lose something essential to the gospel.²⁵

I believe Moltmann is fundamentally right that the cross reveals a suffering God. But I disagree with making suffering essential to God's identity. God freely chose to create, freely chose to love, and freely chose to suffer. Suffering is something God takes upon Himself out of sovereign love — it is not something that defines His eternal being. We will explore this distinction more fully in Chapter 26.

Kazoh Kitamori and Theology of the Pain of God

Before Moltmann brought the suffering God to the center of European theology, a Japanese Lutheran theologian named Kazoh Kitamori (1916–1998) had already written one of the most creative and haunting treatments of divine pain in the modern era. His Theology of the Pain of God, first published in Japanese in 1946 — just one year after Japan's devastating defeat in World War II — is a work born out of national catastrophe and personal anguish.

Kitamori's central argument is that the pain of God is the deepest and most essential truth of the gospel. He distinguishes between God's love and God's pain. God's love is His original and natural response to His creatures. But when those creatures rebel against Him, God experiences pain — a unique kind of suffering that arises when His love encounters human sin. God's pain is not identical to human pain. It is the pain of a holy God whose love is rejected, whose goodness is spurned, whose children have turned away. And yet, remarkably, God's pain does not destroy His love. Instead, His love embraces and overcomes His pain through the cross.²⁶

Kitamori draws on the Japanese concept of tsurasa — a word that captures the feeling of inevitable fate and sorrow that overhangs human life, the poignancy of star-crossed lovers parting never to meet again. Kitamori sees something analogous to tsurasa in God — a divine sorrow that arises from the gap between what God desires for His creatures and what His creatures have made of themselves. This is not weakness. It is the deepest kind of love — a love that absorbs pain rather than retreating from it.²⁷

Kitamori's contribution is valuable for several reasons. He grounds his theology squarely in Scripture rather than philosophy. He maintains a clear distinction between God's pain and human pain. And he insists that God's pain serves a redemptive purpose — it is the pain that leads to salvation, not the pain of a helpless sufferer. While Kitamori's theology is less systematically developed than Moltmann's, it captures something deeply true: the God of the Bible is not serene in the face of human rebellion. He hurts. And His hurt is an expression of His love.

Karl Barth: The Complex Giant

No survey of modern theology can ignore Karl Barth (1886–1968), the Swiss Reformed theologian widely regarded as the most influential Protestant theologian of the twentieth century. Barth's position on divine passibility, however, resists easy categorization. He is neither a straightforward passibilist nor a conventional impassibilist. He is, characteristically, something all his own.

On the one hand, Barth retained something like the traditional emphasis on God's sovereignty and perfection. He affirmed that God is not helplessly subject to suffering the way creatures are. God is the Lord, the sovereign Creator, the One who acts rather than merely being acted upon. In these respects, Barth sounds more classical than modern.

On the other hand, Barth spoke powerfully of God's self-giving in the incarnation and the cross. In his famous essay The Humanity of God, Barth emphasized that God freely chose to be God-for-us — a God who enters into the human condition, identifies with human suffering, and bears the weight of human sin. Barth insisted that the God who reveals Himself in Jesus Christ is not the "absolute" God of the philosophers but the living God who encounters human beings in grace and judgment.²⁸

Barth's most significant contribution to the passibility debate may be his insistence that God's nature is revealed in Christ. If we want to know who God is, we must look at Jesus — not at abstract philosophical concepts. And the Jesus we see in the Gospels is a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:3). If Jesus reveals the Father (John 14:9), then the God revealed in Jesus is a God who knows suffering from the inside.

Barth's complexity is both a strength and a frustration. He refuses to fit neatly into either the passibilist or the impassibilist camp, and scholars continue to debate exactly where to place him. But his fundamental insight — that our doctrine of God must start with God's self-revelation in Christ, not with philosophical speculation — is one that both sides of the debate should take to heart.

Other Important Voices

Several other figures deserve brief mention in this survey. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), often called the "father of modern theology," emphasized religious experience and feeling in ways that opened the door to taking divine emotion seriously, even though his own position on impassibility was ambiguous. The Anglican tradition produced a number of early passibilists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including J. K. Mozley, whose 1926 study The Impassibility of God provided one of the most balanced early assessments of the debate.²⁹

Terence Fretheim's The Suffering of God (1984) offered a careful Old Testament theology of divine suffering, arguing that the Hebrew Bible pervasively portrays God as genuinely suffering with and for His people. Walter Brueggemann's work on the prophets similarly emphasized God's passionate engagement with His creation and His vulnerability to creaturely actions. Nicholas Wolterstorff's Lament for a Son (1987), written after the death of his own adult son in a climbing accident, provided one of the most moving personal testimonies to the comfort of believing in a God who grieves — a God who is "not only the God of the sufferers but the God who suffers."³⁰

Each of these voices, in different ways, contributed to the growing consensus that the old impassibility framework was inadequate. Whether through philosophical argument, biblical exegesis, or personal testimony, they all pointed toward the same conclusion: the God of the Bible is not an unmoved observer but a passionate participant in the drama of creation.

The Five Main Passibilist Arguments

Having met the key thinkers, we now turn to the main arguments they advanced. Lister helpfully identifies five major headings under which the passibilist case can be organized. These five arguments represent the core intellectual case for rejecting impassibility.³¹ While there is considerable overlap among them — most passibilists find several or all of them compelling — it is useful to examine each one distinctly.

Argument 1: The Cross Demands It

The first and perhaps most powerful passibilist argument comes from the cross. If God was truly present and involved in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ — if the person on the cross is God the Son — then God suffered. The traditional response, as we noted above, was to attribute the suffering solely to Christ's human nature. But passibilists argue that this response is inadequate. It treats the two natures of Christ as though they were sealed off from each other — as though the divine Son could be present in a suffering human body without being affected by that suffering. For passibilists, this seems to deny the unity of Christ's person. If it is the same person who is both divine and human, then the suffering cannot simply be quarantined in the human nature and kept away from the divine.

Some passibilists go even further, arguing that to deny divine suffering on the cross is actually closer to heresy than to affirm it. Paul Schilling made this provocative claim: "Those who deny that God can suffer implicitly deny the Incarnation and therefore are closer to heresy than those they censure as 'Patripassians.' "³² This is a bold charge, and it captures the passion of the passibilist conviction: the cross is the supreme revelation of who God is, and if we deny that God suffered there, we have denied something central to the Christian faith.

Lister offers an important response to this argument that we should note. He points out that insisting on ascribing suffering to the divine nature actually "renders the assumption of humanity superfluous." In other words, the logic of redemptive history requires an incarnation precisely because the divine nature itself is not subject to suffering. If the divine nature is already passible, then an incarnation would be redundant — God could suffer without becoming human. The traditional view, by contrast, holds that an incarnation was necessary precisely so that the impassible God could enter into suffering through a genuine human nature.³³ This is a thoughtful point, and we will examine it more carefully in Chapter 26.

Argument 2: Theodicy Requires It

The second major passibilist argument comes from theodicy — the theological attempt to reconcile God's goodness and power with the existence of evil and suffering. Passibilists argue that only a God who suffers with us can serve as an adequate response to the problem of evil. An impassible God who observes suffering without being affected by it offers no comfort to the sufferer. But a God who hurts when we hurt, who weeps when we weep, who is genuinely present in our pain — that God offers something that no philosophical argument can provide: solidarity.

This is the argument that Bonhoeffer captured so memorably: "Only the suffering God can help." It is the argument that Moltmann developed in his theology of the cross, and it is the argument that has resonated most deeply with pastors, counselors, and ordinary Christians who minister to people in the midst of suffering. When a grieving mother asks, "Where is God in this?" the passibilist has a powerful answer: God is right here, suffering alongside you. His heart is breaking too.

Lister notes an important observation about this argument. Passibilist logic here tends to run not from a theological argument for divine passibility to a particular kind of theodicy, but in the opposite direction — from a sense that the "suffering God" theodicy is more existentially satisfying, to the conclusion that God must therefore be passible. In other words, the argument begins with what we feel we need from God (solidarity in suffering) and works backward to what God must be like (passible). This does not necessarily make the argument wrong — sometimes our deepest needs point us toward genuine truths. But we should be aware of the logical direction of the reasoning.³⁴

I believe this passibilist argument captures something deeply true. As we will see in Chapters 28 and 29, the fellow-sufferer theodicy — while not a complete answer to the problem of evil — provides essential pastoral comfort that the impassibility tradition struggles to offer. But we must also heed Lister's caution: the purpose of the cross was to overcome the power and penalty of sin, not merely to say, "I feel your pain." A passibilist theodicy that offers only solidarity without victory ultimately falls short of the biblical hope.³⁵

Argument 3: Scripture Teaches It

The third passibilist argument is straightforward: the Bible pervasively portrays God as an emotional being who is genuinely affected by His creatures. Over four hundred passages describe God's love, grief, anger, jealousy, joy, compassion, patience, and hatred. The sheer volume of this evidence is staggering, and we will survey it in detail in Chapters 11 through 21.

Passibilists argue that this massive body of biblical evidence cannot be explained away as "mere anthropomorphism" (describing God in human terms that do not correspond to anything real in God's experience). When the Bible says that God "was grieved to His heart" (Genesis 6:6), or that "the anger of the LORD was kindled" (Exodus 4:14), or that God "rejoices over you with singing" (Zephaniah 3:17), or that "God is love" (1 John 4:8) — passibilists insist that these statements must be taken as pointing to genuine realities in God, not as poetic fictions. (We address the anthropomorphism objection in full detail in Chapter 6.)

Lister acknowledges the force of this argument but cautions against a simplistic "face value" reading of Scripture that ignores the analogical nature of biblical language about God. God's anger is not identical to human anger in every respect. God's grief is not identical to human grief. The language is analogical — pointing to genuine realities in God that are both similar to and different from their human counterparts. The question is not whether these passages are "true" (they are), but how they are true — and that requires careful theological reflection, not just proof-texting.³⁶

Argument 4: Divine Love Requires It

The fourth argument is perhaps the most philosophically potent: genuine love requires being affected by the beloved. If you truly love someone, you are moved by their joy and pained by their suffering. A "love" that remains utterly unmoved by the beloved's experience is not love at all — it is at best benevolent indifference. Therefore, if God truly loves His creatures (as the Bible insists He does), then He must be genuinely affected by them. And if He is genuinely affected by them, then He is not impassible.

Marcel Sarot has estimated that "almost all contemporary theologians" who affirm divine passibility do so on the grounds that "divine suffering is entailed by the divine love."³⁷ This is the argument that has proven most difficult for impassibilists to answer, and we will examine it in full philosophical depth in Chapter 22, where we explore what Mullins calls the "unity problem" — the internal tension between affirming both that God is impassible and that God truly loves.

Lister acknowledges the importance of juxtaposing divine love and divine impassibility. But he argues that on a more adequate understanding, divine love is "not a hindrance to divine impassibility but rather the close companion of it." His key move is to insist that divine love operates differently from human love — God's love is not reactive and responsive in the same way that human love is. Rather, God's love is sovereign, creative, and initiating. God does not love us because we are lovable; He makes us lovable by loving us. Therefore, God's love does not require Him to be "affected" by us in the way that human love requires being affected by the beloved.³⁸

I find Lister's response partially persuasive but ultimately insufficient, as I will argue in Chapter 22. While it is true that divine love is not identical to human love, the Bible consistently portrays God's love as genuinely responsive — He delights when we obey, grieves when we rebel, and rejoices when we repent. A love that initiates but never responds is not the love we see in Scripture. The author's companion book, The God Beyond the Clock, further develops the argument that genuine emotional responsiveness requires temporality — a God who exists in an eternal timeless "now" cannot genuinely respond to anything, because there is no temporal sequence in which response can occur.

Argument 5: Rahner's Rule Supports It

The fifth passibilist argument draws on what is known as "Rahner's Rule," named after the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner (1904–1984). Rahner famously stated: "The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, and the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity." To unpack this in simpler terms: the "economic Trinity" is God as He reveals Himself in salvation history — Father sending the Son, the Son dying on the cross, the Spirit being poured out at Pentecost. The "immanent Trinity" is God as He is in Himself, apart from creation — the eternal inner life of Father, Son, and Spirit. Rahner's Rule says that these two are identical. Who God is in His dealings with us is who God truly is in Himself.

Passibilists apply Rahner's Rule like this: In the economy of salvation, we see God suffering — the Son on the cross, the Father anguished at the death of the Son, the Spirit grieved by human sin. If the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, then this suffering must reflect something real and eternal in God's own inner life. God does not merely appear to suffer in history while remaining untouched in His eternal reality. His suffering in history reveals His eternal nature.

Moltmann made the most extensive use of Rahner's Rule in this direction. He stated: "In order to grasp the death of the Son in its significance for God himself, I found myself bound to surrender the traditional distinction between the immanent and the economic Trinity." For Moltmann, if the cross is the central revelation of God, then it is impossible to conceive of any Trinity "in which cross and self-giving are not present."³⁹

Lister raises several important objections to this passibilist application of Rahner's Rule. First, left unchecked, Rahner's Rule calls God's self-sufficiency into question and suggests that creation was necessary — exactly the problem we identified in Moltmann's thought. Second, the passibilist application of Rahner's Rule allows theologians to abstract certain elements of the economy (especially the crucifixion) and read them back into God's eternal being as though they constituted the totality of who God is. Thomas Weinandy warns that when this happens, "the significance of Christ's suffering and death is no longer found in their historical truth... but rather it is diminished to a mythological expression or symbol of what is happening transcendentally and ahistorically to and within God."⁴⁰

Third, Lister points out that if we consistently apply Rahner's Rule in the way passibilists suggest, we would have to conclude that God is eternally wrathful — because we see God's wrath in the economy of redemption. But no one believes God is eternally angry. This shows that the relationship between the economic and immanent Trinity is more nuanced than a simple one-to-one correspondence. God's wrath in the economy reveals something true about God (His eternal holiness and justice), but it does not mean God is eternally wrathful. Similarly, God's suffering on the cross reveals something true about God (His willingness to enter into suffering out of love), but it does not necessarily mean God is eternally suffering.⁴¹

I believe Lister is largely right on this point. Rahner's Rule, applied without qualification, leads to serious theological problems — including the denial of God's self-sufficiency and the necessity of creation. But Rahner's core insight remains important: what God does in history reveals something genuine about who He is. The cross truly reveals God's character — His willingness to suffer for love, His solidarity with the broken, His determination to redeem. We just need to be careful about how we move from what God does to who God eternally is.

Assessing the Revolution: Strengths and Excesses

Having surveyed the forces, the thinkers, and the arguments of the passibilist revolution, where do we stand? I believe we need to render a balanced verdict — one that honors the genuine insights of the revolution while honestly naming its excesses.

What the Revolution Got Right

The modern passibilist revolution got several critically important things right.

First, it recovered the biblical portrait of God. For centuries, the God of the Bible — the God who grieves, rejoices, burns with anger, weeps over His wayward children, and sings with delight over His beloved people — had been filtered through philosophical categories that muted and distorted His emotional life. The passibilist revolution insisted that the biblical portrait be taken at face value (or at least at analogical value — more on this in Chapter 6). This was an enormous service to Christian theology.

Second, it asked the right pastoral question. When people are suffering, they do not need a lecture on divine perfection. They need to know that God cares. The passibilist revolution put pastoral concern back at the center of the doctrine of God, insisting that our theology of God must be able to speak comfort to the suffering, hope to the grieving, and assurance to the broken. An impassibility doctrine that cannot do these things has failed at its most basic pastoral task.

Third, it took the cross seriously. The classical impassibility tradition always struggled with the cross. If God cannot suffer, what do we make of Calvary? The passibilist revolution insisted that the cross is not merely a legal transaction that left God Himself untouched. It is a genuine divine event in which God entered into the depths of human suffering and bore it in His own being. Whatever we think of the specific proposals of Moltmann or Kitamori, their insistence that the cross reveals a suffering God captures something essential about the Christian faith.

Fourth, it challenged the hidden philosophical assumptions of the tradition. The passibilist revolution exposed the degree to which the classical doctrine of God had been shaped by Greek philosophical categories — especially Platonic and Aristotelian assumptions about divine perfection, changelessness, and self-sufficiency. By bringing these assumptions to light, the revolution forced theologians to ask whether their doctrine of God was truly derived from Scripture or from philosophy — a question that every thoughtful Christian should welcome.

Where the Revolution Went Too Far

But the passibilist revolution also had significant excesses that we need to name honestly.

First, some passibilists made suffering essential to God's nature. Moltmann, as we have seen, tends to make the cross constitutive of God's eternal Trinitarian identity, which compromises God's aseity and makes creation necessary. If God needs a world to suffer in order to be fully God, then God is dependent on creation — and that is a denial of a fundamental biblical truth. God freely chose to create. He freely chose to love. He freely chose to enter into suffering. None of this was forced upon Him or necessary for Him to be who He is.

Second, some passibilists blurred the distinction between divine and human suffering. If God suffers exactly the way we suffer — overwhelmed, confused, helpless — then He is not sovereign, and His suffering offers no redemptive hope. The Bible portrays a God whose suffering is always purposeful, always under His sovereign control, and always aimed at redemption. God's grief never incapacitates Him. His anger never overwhelms His love. His suffering on the cross accomplished something — it defeated sin and death. A doctrine of divine suffering that loses this dimension of purposeful, sovereign suffering has lost something essential.

Third, as Lister points out, the modern passibilist revolution involved a significant definitional shift. Classical impassibilists never claimed that God was emotionless or indifferent. They claimed that God was not subject to involuntary passions — that His emotional life was sovereign, controlled, and purposeful. But modern passibilists often caricatured the classical position as though it taught an utterly emotionless God — and then rejected that caricature. Lister argues that "some of the traction of contemporary passibilism is gained by reacting against a parody — whether intentionally created or not — of what self-identifying impassibilists predominantly believed."⁴² This is an important corrective. If we are going to reject impassibility, we should reject the real thing, not a straw man.

Fourth, the passibilist revolution was itself influenced by extrabiblical philosophical commitments — especially Hegelianism and process philosophy — even as it accused the impassibility tradition of being too philosophical. As Lister notes, the modern philosophical ethos that replaced the older metaphysics of being with an "ontology of becoming" was itself an extrabiblical influence. The passibilist critique of "Greek philosophy" in classical theism is valid, but it loses some of its force when passibilists themselves are drawing on modern philosophical sources rather than simply letting Scripture speak.⁴³

Toward a Mediating Position

Where does all this leave us? I believe the evidence points toward a mediating position — one that takes both the traditional concerns and the modern insights seriously. This is the position I have been developing throughout this book, and it is the position I will articulate most fully in Chapter 34.

The core of this mediating position can be stated simply: God genuinely feels. He truly loves, truly grieves, truly rejoices, truly burns with righteous anger. But God's emotions never overwhelm, destabilize, or control Him. He is not ruled by His passions like a human being. He is sovereign over His affective life. In this qualified sense — and only this sense — we can affirm a form of impassibility.

This is not a novel position. As we have seen, it has deep roots in the tradition — deeper, in fact, than many realize. Even the Church Fathers, as we argued in Chapter 7, held something closer to qualified impassibility than to the extreme version that modern passibilists have rejected. And in the contemporary theological landscape, a growing number of evangelical scholars are converging on various forms of this mediating position — Lister's "impassible and impassioned," Kim's "mediating theology," Cole's "biblically qualified impassibility," and Peckham's "qualified passibility." We will survey these contemporary mediating proposals in the next chapter.

The modern passibilist revolution was a necessary corrective. It recovered truths about God that had been obscured by centuries of philosophical overlay. But like many revolutionary movements, it sometimes overcorrected — swinging from one extreme (God feels nothing) to another (God suffers just like we do). The task now is to find the biblical center — the place where God's genuine emotional engagement with His creatures is affirmed alongside His sovereign, purposeful, never-overwhelmed control of His own affective life.

That center, I am convinced, is found not in the philosophers — whether ancient or modern — but in Scripture itself. The God of the Bible is neither the unmoved mover of Aristotle nor the helplessly suffering God of process theology. He is the God who stands before Moses and declares, "The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness" (Exodus 34:6). He is the God who grieves over the rebellion of His children but is never defeated by that grief. He is the God who burns with righteous anger at injustice but is never consumed by that anger. He is the God who so loved the world that He gave His only Son (John 3:16) — not because He had to, but because He freely chose to. He is the God who, in the person of the Son, hung on a cross and bore the sins of the world — not as a helpless victim of circumstances, but as the sovereign Lord who entered into suffering to redeem it from the inside.

That is the God the modern revolution rediscovered — even if it sometimes described Him in ways that went beyond what Scripture teaches. And that is the God this book seeks to present: the God whose heart beats with genuine emotion, whose love is truly responsive, whose grief is truly real — and who, in all of this, remains the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth, never overwhelmed, never destabilized, never anything less than fully God.

Connection to the Author's Companion Works

The modern passibilist revolution raises several issues that are treated more fully in the author's companion books. The question of divine temporality — whether God can genuinely experience temporal succession — is directly relevant because genuine emotional responsiveness requires the ability to experience events as they unfold. If God exists in an eternal timeless "now," it is difficult to see how He can genuinely grieve "when" a child dies or genuinely rejoice "when" a sinner repents. The companion book The God Beyond the Clock: A Biblical and Theological Case for Dynamic Divine Temporality argues that God is genuinely temporal — able to experience events in sequence — while also transcending the limitations of creaturely time. The passibilist revolution's emphasis on God's genuine engagement with history presupposes something like this view of divine temporality.

Similarly, the cross — the central event for the passibilist revolution — raises fundamental questions about the relationship between the divine and human natures of Christ. The companion book The Incarnation and the Soul: Why Physicalism Fails the Christ of the Creeds argues that Christ's human emotions (weeping, anger, distress, joy) require a human soul — they are not merely neurochemical events in a brain. This has implications for how we understand God's suffering on the cross: it was the divine Son who suffered through His complete human nature (body and soul), and this suffering reveals something genuinely true about who God is.

Conclusion

The story we have told in this chapter is one of the most dramatic in the history of Christian theology. A doctrine that stood virtually unchallenged for over a millennium — the impassibility of God — was overturned in the span of roughly a century. The forces behind this revolution were many: the unprecedented suffering of the World Wars and the Holocaust, the philosophical revolution inaugurated by Hegel, the rediscovery of the passionate God of the prophets by Heschel, the fresh reading of Scripture by modern biblical scholars, and the theological shift from divine transcendence to divine immanence. The key voices — Moltmann, Kitamori, Bonhoeffer, Barth, and many others — built a powerful case for a God who genuinely suffers, genuinely loves, and genuinely enters into the pain of His creatures.

The five arguments advanced by the passibilist revolution — from the cross, from theodicy, from Scripture, from divine love, and from Rahner's Rule — represent a formidable intellectual case for rejecting strict impassibility. Each argument has real force, and taken together, they constitute a challenge that the impassibility tradition cannot simply dismiss.

But we have also seen that the revolution had its excesses. Some passibilists made suffering essential to God's nature, compromising His aseity and freedom. Others blurred the distinction between divine and human suffering. Still others substituted one set of philosophical assumptions for another while claiming to be purely biblical. These excesses need to be honestly acknowledged, even as we affirm the revolution's core insight.

And that core insight is this: the God of the Bible is not the unmoved mover of the philosophers. He is the living God who genuinely feels, genuinely cares, genuinely responds, and genuinely enters into the suffering of His creatures. The modern revolution rediscovered this God — the God who had always been there in the pages of Scripture, waiting to be seen by eyes no longer blinded by philosophical assumptions about what perfection requires.

In the next chapter, we will turn from the modern revolution to the contemporary evangelical landscape. How are evangelicals — who are deeply committed to both biblical authority and theological tradition — navigating this debate? Where do the major evangelical voices stand? And what does the future of this conversation look like? As we will see, a new generation of evangelical scholars is forging a mediating path that may represent the most promising way forward.