Part III: A Brief History of the Debate

Chapter 10

The Contemporary Evangelical Landscape

Where Do We Stand?

PART III: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DEBATE

Introduction: A Shifting Landscape

In the previous chapter, we traced the dramatic reversal that took place in modern theology. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the doctrine of divine impassibility — which had been virtually unchallenged for over a thousand years — was toppled from its position of dominance. Theologians like Jürgen Moltmann, Kazoh Kitamori, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Abraham Heschel made powerful cases that the God of the Bible is not the distant, unmoved deity of the Greek philosophers but a God who genuinely suffers, genuinely loves, and genuinely responds to what happens in His world. By the end of the twentieth century, the scholarly consensus in mainline and academic theology had shifted decisively in favor of passibility. As we noted, the passibilist revolution was largely right in its core insight: God truly feels.

But what about evangelical theology? Where do evangelicals stand on this question today? That is the subject of this chapter, and the answer turns out to be more complicated — and more interesting — than many people realize.

The thesis I want to defend in this chapter is this: Evangelical theology today is deeply divided on divine impassibility, with voices ranging from strong affirmation to outright rejection to various mediating positions — and the mediating positions are gaining ground. The evangelical landscape is not a monolith. It is a lively conversation among thoughtful, Bible-believing scholars who disagree — sometimes sharply — about what the Bible and the theological tradition actually teach about God's emotional life. And I believe that understanding this conversation is essential if we are going to find our way to a faithful, biblical answer.

Before we survey the contemporary positions, though, we need to understand why evangelicals have been slower than their mainline counterparts to embrace the passibilist revolution. There are at least two important reasons.

First, evangelicals are more deeply committed to the authority of historical confessions and creeds. Many evangelical confessions of faith include some form of impassibility language. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), for example, describes God as "without body, parts, or passions" — a direct affirmation of impassibility.¹ The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England say the same. For evangelicals who take these confessions seriously, rejecting impassibility is not a simple matter. It means disagreeing with documents that have shaped Protestant theology for centuries.

Second, evangelicals have been wary of the liberal theology that so often accompanied the passibilist revolution. As we saw in Chapter 9, many of the most prominent passibilist voices — Moltmann, Kitamori, the process theologians — came from traditions that evangelicals viewed with suspicion on other grounds. If the same theologians who denied the inerrancy of Scripture, questioned the bodily resurrection, or flirted with universalism were also the ones championing a passible God, many evangelicals were understandably cautious. The reasoning, though not always stated explicitly, went something like this: if these theologians got so many other things wrong, maybe we should be careful about following them on this issue too.²

But the evangelical landscape is shifting. A new generation of evangelical scholars is rethinking impassibility from within a fully orthodox, confessional framework. These are not theologians who are abandoning the authority of Scripture or the ecumenical creeds. They are scholars who love the Bible, affirm the Trinity, believe in the substitutionary atonement, and hold to the full deity and humanity of Christ. And yet they are raising hard questions about whether the classical doctrine of divine impassibility does full justice to the biblical portrait of God. The result is a rich, multifaceted conversation that we need to understand.³

There is a third factor worth mentioning as well. As Lister has noted, evangelical monographs on the specific topic of divine impassibility have historically been in short supply. While systematic theologies by evangelicals regularly touch on the subject — usually in a few pages buried in a chapter on God's attributes — extended, dedicated treatments were rare until the last couple of decades. This began to change in the early 2000s with the publication of works like Lister's own God Is Impassible and Impassioned (2013), Kim's Constructing a Mediating Theology (2022), and the multi-author volume Divine Impassibility: Four Views (2019). The fact that evangelicals are now producing full-length monographs on this topic is itself a sign of how seriously the conversation is being taken. The question of God's emotional life is no longer a footnote in evangelical theology. It is moving toward center stage.

In what follows, I want to map this evangelical landscape by identifying five main positions: (1) contemporary philosophical impassibilists who have mounted sophisticated new defenses of the doctrine, (2) evangelical strong affirmers of impassibility who defend the classical tradition without apology, (3) evangelical rejecters of impassibility who believe it must be abandoned, (4) evangelical modifiers who want to preserve the term while revising its content, and (5) mediating positions that seek to hold together both the genuine insights of impassibility and the biblical evidence for divine passibility. It is in this last camp — the growing center — that I believe the most promising work is being done, and it is in this camp that my own position is located.

Contemporary Philosophical Impassibilists: The New Minority

Even though passibilism has become the dominant position in modern theology, impassibilism has not disappeared. In fact, in the last few decades, several scholars have produced noteworthy philosophical defenses of divine impassibility. Two figures stand out as especially important: Richard Creel and Thomas Weinandy. As Rob Lister puts it, though impassibilism is "still a minority position within the academy," it "seems to have begun a miniature resurgence" thanks to scholars like these.⁴

Richard Creel: A Philosopher's Defense

In 1986, Richard Creel published Divine Impassibility: An Essay in Philosophical Theology with Cambridge University Press. It quickly became recognized — by passibilists and impassibilists alike — as one of the most important defenses of divine impassibility in the twentieth century.⁵ Creel's argument is philosophically rigorous, carefully constructed, and worth understanding in detail.

Creel begins by surveying the many different ways that impassibility has been understood throughout history. He identifies eight possible nuances of the term. From these, he draws out a core definition: impassibility is "imperviousness to causal influence from external factors."⁶ In a later essay, he stated it even more strongly: impassibility means "that it is logically impossible for God to be affected by anything."⁷

This definition is important — and, as we will see, controversial. Creel then observes that impassibility could potentially apply to God in four different areas: His nature, His will, His knowledge, and His feelings.⁸ Throughout the rest of his book, Creel argues that God is impassible in nature, will, and feelings, but partly passible and partly impassible with respect to knowledge.

How does Creel arrive at this conclusion? Let me walk through his reasoning briefly.

On God's nature, Creel takes it to be fairly uncontroversial that God's essential nature cannot be changed from outside. Even most passibilists would agree with this. God is who He is, and no external force can alter His fundamental being.⁹

On God's will, Creel argues that God is impassible because He eternally knows all possibilities. God's will is not a "response" to what happens in the world but what Creel calls a "presponse" — an eternal, all-encompassing plan that already accounts for every possible contingency. God eternally wills a set of mutually exclusive possibilities, and the actualization of any particular outcome depends on human choices. But God's willing is eternal and complete. He should not be thought of as "implementing now this decision and now that" but as "eternally willing and doing everything that he ever wills and does."¹⁰

On God's knowledge, Creel's position is more nuanced. He holds that God's knowledge of all abstract possibilities is impassible — God eternally knows every possible state of affairs. But God's knowledge of concrete realities changes as possibilities become actualities. In this sense, God's knowledge is partly passible.¹¹ To use Creel's own example: there was a time when God knew that it was not possible for Creel to go swimming; now God knows that it is possible. God's knowledge of what is possible for any given creature changes as that creature's abilities change. Similarly, God's knowledge of the past is in one sense impassible (He always knows the past perfectly) but in another sense passible (the content of the past grows as new events happen and pass from present to past). And God's knowledge of the future, on Creel's view, is passible because God has exhaustive knowledge only of abstract possibilities — not of which possibilities will actually be chosen by His free creatures.

It is worth noting that Creel is a libertarian on human free will and denies that God has exhaustive foreknowledge of future free actions — a position that puts him outside the evangelical mainstream. This is a significant point. By denying exhaustive foreknowledge and creation ex nihilo, Creel gives up two doctrines that most evangelicals would consider essential — and, ironically, two doctrines that actually help make a stronger case for the kind of qualified impassibility that I will defend in this book.¹²

On God's feelings, Creel returns to defend impassibility. He offers three main reasons. First, God is eternally blissful, and His emotions are not dependent on anyone else. Second, God's primary purpose in creation was to make free creatures who could choose for or against His kingdom — not to have creatures who make Him feel a certain way. Since God's purpose was simply to provide this meaningful choice, "he is not grieved by those who choose against his kingdom." Third, the greater good that will come in God's kingdom justifies any innocent suffering that occurs in the meantime.¹³

Interestingly, in a later essay, Creel himself revised his position on emotional impassibility. He suggested that perhaps we should distinguish between God being emotionally "touched" and emotionally "crushed" by His creatures. The impassibilist insight worth preserving, Creel wrote, is that God is not emotionally "crushed" by what happens in the world. But the passibilist insight worth preserving is that God is emotionally "touched" by the joys and sufferings of His creatures.¹⁵ This later revision is a significant concession — and it moves Creel closer to the mediating position that I will defend in this book.

Thomas Weinandy: An Impassible and Passionate God

In 2000, Roman Catholic scholar Thomas Weinandy published his widely regarded monograph Does God Suffer? with the University of Notre Dame Press. Where Creel's approach is primarily philosophical, Weinandy's is more biblical and theological. He seeks to give real weight to the doctrine of divine impassibility by anchoring it in two key foundations: the Creator/creature distinction and the intra-Trinitarian life of God.¹⁶

Weinandy's argument proceeds as follows. The God of the Bible is the Creator — fundamentally and ontologically distinct from everything He has made. God exists in what Weinandy calls the "uncreated order." Sin, suffering, and evil exist only in the created order. While God can influence the created order, suffering and evil from the created order cannot "infect" the uncreated order. If they could, the distinction between Creator and creature would collapse.¹⁷

Central to Weinandy's argument is his understanding of the Trinity. The three Persons of the Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — are, in Weinandy's language, "subsistent relations fully in act." What does that mean in plain language? It means that the Trinitarian Persons are completely and perfectly related to one another in an eternal fellowship of love. They do not have any "relational potential" that needs to be fulfilled. They are already fully actualized in their love, joy, and communion.¹⁸

This has a crucial implication for the passibility debate. If God is already fully actualized in His intra-Trinitarian love, then creation does not add anything to God's essential emotional experience. God did not create the world because He was lonely, unfulfilled, or needed creatures to love. He was already fully loved and fully loving within the Trinitarian fellowship. Creation is a free act, not a necessary one.

From this foundation, Weinandy draws his understanding of divine emotions. He argues that what appear to be emotions like compassion, sorrow, and grief are actually expressions of God's love — but God experiences them without any process of change. As Weinandy puts it, God's love "embraces mercy, compassion, patience, forgiveness and even sorrow and grief." But these are "subsumed and contained within the perfectly actualized love of God, but now devoid of the suffering."¹⁹ God's emotions are entirely active, never passive. He is never acted upon from outside.

When it comes to the incarnation and the cross, Weinandy argues that God the Son experienced suffering and death only in His human nature. The divine nature remained impassible throughout. To argue for suffering in the divine nature, Weinandy contends, would actually "lock God out of human suffering" — because only by suffering as a human could God truly enter into our experience.²⁰

This is a provocative claim, and it deserves careful consideration. Weinandy is saying that the whole point of the incarnation is that God took on a human nature in order to suffer humanly. If we say that God suffered in His divine nature, we have actually undermined the purpose of the incarnation. Why would God need to become human if He could already suffer as God? For Weinandy, the incarnation is precisely the mechanism by which God bridges the gap between His impassible divine nature and the reality of human suffering.

Interestingly, Weinandy does acknowledge that the Father experiences something like grief over the suffering of the Son — but he insists this is metaphorical rather than indicating genuine emotional change. As Weinandy puts it, while grief and sorrow can be predicated of the Father, "such emotions do not imply that the Father underwent emotional changes of state or that he suffered some form of divine mental and emotional distress comparable to human beings."⁷⁰ This is where I part company with Weinandy most sharply. If the Father's grief over the crucifixion of His Son is merely metaphorical — if it does not point to something genuinely real in the Father's experience — then the cross loses much of its revelatory power. I believe the cross reveals the heart of God, not merely the human nature of Christ. But this is an argument I will develop at length in Chapter 26.

Evangelical Strong Affirmers of Impassibility

What about evangelicals themselves? Where do they stand? As Lister helpfully maps the terrain, most evangelical voices on divine impassibility can be grouped into one of three categories: those who affirm it, those who reject it, and those who want to modify it.²² Let us begin with those who affirm it.

Gerald Bray

Gerald Bray is a respected evangelical theologian who has argued that the early Christian understanding of divine impassibility was simply about God's "inability to suffer" — what Bray calls "impassibility in the strict sense."²³ Drawing on the patristic tradition (especially John of Damascus), Bray explains that the emphasis of the classical doctrine was "not on tranquility in a state of indifference, but on the sovereignty of God, whose being could not be attacked or harmed by any outside power."²⁴

Crucially, Bray makes a distinction between God's essence and God's persons. While the persons of the Trinity "are indeed moved by our suffering," Bray argues, God's essence "is untouched by it."²⁵ The Son of God suffered and died for us on the cross "in his human nature," but the divine essence remained unaffected. This is a careful position that tries to hold together the biblical testimony of divine engagement with the classical commitment to God's essential unchangeableness.

Paul Helm

Paul Helm is perhaps the most notable evangelical defender of divine impassibility.²⁶ Helm approaches the doctrine through a chain of theological reasoning. As he puts it, one could argue: "(1) God is timelessly eternal. (2) Whatever is timelessly eternal is unchangeable. (3) Whatever is unchangeable is impassible. (4) Therefore, God is impassible."²⁷ If God exists outside of time, then He does not undergo changes of state — including changes of emotional state. His affections, whatever they are, are eternal and unchanging.

Notice how much is packed into this deceptively simple argument. Helm is saying that divine impassibility is not just one doctrine among many. It is a logical consequence of divine timelessness and immutability. If God is timeless, then He does not experience sequence — there is no "before" and "after" in God's experience. And if there is no sequence, then God's emotional life cannot change from one moment to the next. He cannot go from "not grieving" to "grieving" in response to a child's death, because that would require temporal succession. His emotional engagement with the world must be eternally what it is, all at once, without change.

This is a powerful argument, and it connects the impassibility debate directly to the question of God and time — a question I address at length in my companion volume, The God Beyond the Clock. As I argue there, I believe God can genuinely experience temporal succession, which means that Helm's chain of reasoning breaks down at its first link. If God is not strictly timeless, then the logical pathway from timelessness to immutability to impassibility collapses. But that is an argument for another book. Here, it is enough to note that Helm's defense of impassibility depends heavily on a specific view of God's relationship to time — a view that a growing number of evangelical scholars now question.

Helm argues that applying emotional feelings to God is a mistake because such feelings "suppose that there are occasions when God is less than wholly active."²⁸ God's emotional dispositions, unlike ours, are "maximally active" — always fully exercised, never dormant, never triggered by outside events. There is no unfulfilled potential in God.²⁹

Helm also argues that Scripture itself gives us two sets of data about God: those that portray Him as having human-like traits, and those that are "incompatible with humanity." In Helm's view, the metaphysical data — God's eternity, immutability, self-sufficiency — must control how we read the anthropomorphic data. The alternative, he warns, would be "a theological reductionism in which God is distilled to human proportions."³⁰

Yet, strikingly, Helm himself uses the term "impassioned" to describe God. He writes that we should think of God as "essentially impassioned, full of feeling, utterly engaged in the most clear-eyed way possible." The difference between God's being impassioned and human passion is that God's engagement is always fully active, never reactive, and never distorted by the limitations that plague human emotions.³¹

James Dolezal

James Dolezal represents the strongest recent evangelical defense of strict classical theism, including strict divine simplicity and impassibility. In his influential book All That Is in God (2017), Dolezal argues that any modification of divine simplicity or impassibility leads to what he calls "theistic mutualism" — a framework in which God and the world exist in a relationship of mutual dependence. On Dolezal's view, if God is genuinely affected by His creatures — if His emotional state changes in response to what happens in the world — then God's inner life is partly determined by factors outside Himself. And that, Dolezal argues, compromises God's aseity (self-sufficiency) and sovereignty.³²

Dolezal's position is clear and uncompromising. He believes that the recent trend toward modifying classical theism — even the moderate, carefully qualified modifications proposed by scholars like Lister and Frame — is a slippery slope away from the God of orthodox Christian confession. For Dolezal, the choice is binary: either God is purely actual, absolutely simple, and strictly impassible, or God is a being whose existence is partly shaped by His creatures — a god unworthy of worship.³³

I respect Dolezal's commitment to divine aseity. He is right to insist that God does not need the world and that creation adds nothing to God's essential perfection. But I believe Dolezal presents a false dilemma. There is a vast middle ground between saying "God is totally unaffected by anything" and saying "God is dependent on the world." A parent does not become dependent on a child simply by being genuinely moved by that child's joy or suffering. Similarly, God can be freely, voluntarily, and sovereignly affected by His creatures without His essential nature being compromised. As we will see in Chapter 34, the mediating position I defend in this book preserves divine aseity while also doing justice to the overwhelming biblical evidence that God genuinely responds to His creatures.

Evangelical Rejecters of Impassibility

At the other end of the evangelical spectrum, we find scholars who have explicitly rejected divine impassibility. This group includes some who identify with Open Theism — a movement that denies God's exhaustive foreknowledge and argues that God genuinely risks, changes His plans, and is surprised by human choices.³⁵ While Open Theism represents an important conversation partner (and one that I engage in this book's companion volume, The God Beyond the Clock), I want to focus here on two more conservative evangelical voices who have rejected impassibility: John Stott and John Feinberg.

John Stott

John Stott — one of the most influential evangelical leaders of the twentieth century — addressed divine impassibility in his landmark book The Cross of Christ (1986). Stott accepted the terms of the Hellenization thesis (discussed in Chapter 7): the idea that Greek philosophy led the Church Fathers to speak of God in ways that were "more Greek than Hebrew."³⁶ The Fathers' intentions were noble, Stott acknowledged. They wanted to safeguard the truth that God is perfect and changeless. And Stott was quick to agree that there is real truth in what they were trying to protect: "God cannot be influenced against his will from either outside or inside. He is never the unwilling victim either of actions which affect him from without or of emotions which upset him from within."³⁷

As Lister astutely observes, this particular statement from Stott is actually "a rather fine statement of impassibility," though Stott does not seem to recognize it as such.³⁸ Stott goes on to accept the basic definition of impassibility as God's incapacity for suffering — and then rejects it. For Stott, the best way to confront impassibility is to understand the nature of love. "If love is self-giving," Stott wrote, "then it is inevitably vulnerable to pain, since it exposes itself to the possibility of rejection and insult."³⁹

Stott concluded his analysis with a statement that has been widely quoted: "I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as 'God on the cross.' In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it?"⁴⁰

Stott's passion is deeply moving, and his fundamental instinct — that a God who cannot suffer cannot truly love — resonates powerfully with both Scripture and human experience. But his engagement with the doctrine of impassibility is brief and somewhat surface-level. He does not distinguish between different versions of the doctrine, and he appears to be rejecting a caricature rather than the nuanced classical position. Had Stott been presented with the "qualified impassibility" model — the view that God is not involuntarily affected from outside but is genuinely, voluntarily passionate — he might well have found it satisfactory.

John Feinberg

John Feinberg, a conservative Calvinist theologian, offers a different but equally instructive case. In his systematic theology No One Like Him (2001), Feinberg candidly states that he rejects the doctrine of divine impassibility and believes that God can experience "real emotions."⁴¹ Feinberg argues that divine responsiveness should not be seen as a deficiency. If God hears and answers prayers, and if He changes His attitudes toward us when we repent, then His mental and emotional states must be influenced to some extent by what we do. But this does not mean that God is dependent on us or that we can force Him to think or do things against His will.⁴²

What is striking about Feinberg's position is that, as Lister observes, his actual description of God's emotional responsiveness sounds remarkably compatible with the classical doctrine of impassibility, properly understood. Feinberg defines God's emotional responses as voluntary, not involuntary. God is affected by His creatures, yes — but only because He freely chooses to be. No creature can force God to feel something against His will. As Lister notes, Feinberg appears to be "rejecting what he has been told impassibility means, but not in fact what classical proponents of impassibility generally believed."⁴³

This is a crucial observation, and it is worth pausing to let it sink in. Feinberg explicitly rejects impassibility. And yet what he actually affirms — that God's emotional responses are voluntary, self-determined, and not imposed from outside — is precisely what the mainstream classical tradition was trying to protect. Feinberg's substantive position is much closer to classical impassibility than his terminology would suggest. He is rejecting a label while affirming the reality the label was designed to protect.

Lister's insight here is deeply important: "It may be that some evangelicals are rejecting what they have been told impassibility means, but not in fact what classical proponents of impassibility generally believed. Thus, they may not be rejecting the best understanding of impassibility, but only its caricature." Lister even suggests that some in this camp — including Stott and Feinberg — might be "amenable" to the qualified impassibility model once they understand what it actually affirms and denies.⁷¹

This is a crucial observation. It highlights the enormous role that terminological confusion has played in the impassibility debate. Many evangelicals who think they are rejecting impassibility are actually rejecting a caricature of it. And many who think they are defending it are defending something more extreme than the classical tradition actually taught. The result is a great deal of unnecessary disagreement — people arguing past each other because they mean different things by the same words.

Evangelical Modifiers of Impassibility

Between the affirmers and the rejecters stands a third group: evangelicals who want to modify the doctrine of impassibility rather than simply affirming or denying it. These scholars appreciate certain emphases of the impassibility tradition but believe the traditional doctrine is one-sided and needs some correction. Two of the most important voices in this camp are John Frame and Millard Erickson.⁴⁵

John Frame

John Frame is one of the most influential Reformed theologians of the last half-century, and his treatment of divine emotion in The Doctrine of God (2002) is rich and rewarding. Frame accepts the view that the traditional understanding of impassibility, as shaped by Hellenistic influence, meant the absence of emotion. He then offers a set of reflections on divine emotion that, in Lister's judgment, actually "serve to develop (and not revise) the two-pronged insight of the classical position insofar as divine emotion is specifically concerned."⁴⁶ In other words, on the specific issue of God's emotions, Frame stands in the same stream as his classical forebears, even if he does not realize it.

Frame affirms that God has genuine emotions — joy, grief, anger, love, compassion. But these emotions are always controlled and purposeful. They are never irrational, never involuntary, never the result of creatures overwhelming God's inner life. God's emotions are expressions of His lordship: they are controlled, authoritative, and involved — the very qualities Frame identifies with God's sovereignty in general.⁴⁷

Where Frame departs from the classical tradition more significantly is on the question of divine suffering. On this point, Frame aligns himself with Moltmann, concluding that "Christ's sufferings are the sufferings of God."⁴⁸ This is a more passibilist statement than what we find in Bray or Helm, and it places Frame in a genuinely mediating position — not simply affirming the tradition, but modifying it in the direction of greater passibility.

Kim's study of Frame provides additional insight. Frame uses what he calls "tri-perspectivalism" — a method that examines every theological question from three angles: the normative (what does Scripture say?), the situational (what does the world tell us?), and the existential (what does our experience reveal?). Applied to divine emotion, this means Frame takes all three sources of evidence seriously: the biblical texts that portray God as emotional, the philosophical considerations about what emotions involve, and the personal experience of relating to a God who genuinely responds to prayer. As Kim notes, Frame's approach "draws on both strengths" of the impassibilist and passibilist traditions, seeking to "affirm both that the impassible God decrees his emotional responses actively and that the passible God suffers and experiences them passively in time."⁴⁹

Millard Erickson

Millard Erickson, another major evangelical systematician, takes a similar but slightly different approach. Although John Frame identifies Erickson as one who holds the traditional view of divine impassibility, it is more accurate to see Erickson as someone who views himself as modifying the traditional doctrine.⁵⁰

Erickson acknowledges that God has genuine emotional responsiveness and that His relational states change in interaction with His creatures. At the same time, Erickson insists on God's sovereignty over His own affective life. God is never overwhelmed, never surprised (Erickson affirms exhaustive foreknowledge), and never destabilized. Erickson's approach to the transcendence and immanence of God leads him to affirm that God is both atemporal and temporal — existing beyond time in His essential nature while also genuinely engaging with His creatures within time.⁵¹

Like Frame, Erickson is doing careful work in the middle ground. He is not simply throwing out the tradition, nor is he uncritically accepting it. He is trying to say something more nuanced: God genuinely feels, but God's feelings are sovereign, purposeful, and always under His own control. This is a position that I find deeply sympathetic, and it is close to where I stand — though, as I will explain shortly, I lean somewhat more passibilist than either Frame or Erickson.

Mediating Positions: The Growing Center

We now arrive at what I believe is the most important and most promising area of contemporary evangelical thought on divine impassibility: the mediating positions. These are scholars who are not content to simply affirm or deny impassibility but who are trying to articulate a more careful, more biblical, more nuanced account of God's emotional life. The mediating camp includes several distinct proposals, and I want to present each one with the detail it deserves.

Rob Lister: "Impassible and Impassioned"

Rob Lister's God Is Impassible and Impassioned (2013) is the most comprehensive evangelical treatment of divine impassibility to date. As the title suggests, Lister's thesis is that God is both impassible and impassioned — and that these are not contradictions but complementary truths.⁵²

What does Lister mean by this? He argues that God is impassible in a very specific sense: God cannot be overwhelmed, manipulated, or destabilized by His creatures. God is invulnerable to emotional fluctuation that would be "involuntarily precipitated" by members of His creation. His emotional engagement with the world is always voluntary, always proceeds from His own initiative, and never catches Him off guard.⁵³

But — and this is the crucial "and" — God is also genuinely impassioned. He has real emotional responses to what happens in the world. He genuinely grieves over sin, genuinely rejoices over repentance, genuinely burns with righteous anger at injustice, and genuinely delights in His people. These are not mere metaphors. They point to something real in God's experience. God is, in Lister's language, "supremely passionate about his creatures' practice of either obedience or rebellion, as well as their experience of either joy or affliction."⁵⁴

Lister grounds this framework in the classical tradition itself. As he demonstrates throughout his extensive historical survey (which we engaged in Chapters 7–9), the mainstream of the classical impassibility tradition was not teaching that God has no emotions. It was teaching that God has no involuntary passions — no uncontrolled, destabilizing emotional reactions that would compromise His sovereignty. The Fathers were not saying God is apathetic. They were saying God is not pathetic in the original Greek sense of being ruled by passions.⁵⁵

Lister's contribution is invaluable. His historical work has shown that the classical tradition is far more nuanced than either its modern defenders or its modern critics have recognized. His "impassible and impassioned" framework provides a way to honor the genuine insights of both the impassibility tradition (God is sovereign over His emotions) and the passibility tradition (God genuinely feels). This is close to my own position, though I lean somewhat more passibilist than Lister. Where Lister tends to emphasize God's invulnerability, I want to emphasize God's genuine vulnerability — the vulnerability of a Father who freely opens His heart to be wounded by the rebellion of His children and the suffering of His creatures.

J. D. Kim: The Mediating Theology

J. D. Kim's Constructing a Mediating Theology (2022) offers another important mediating proposal, built on a Trinitarian foundation.⁵⁶ Kim's central thesis is that the immanent Trinity — God as He is in Himself, in the eternal fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit — is impassible. But the economic Trinity — God as He engages with creation in the work of creation, redemption, and sanctification — is passible.⁵⁷

What does this distinction mean in plain language? Kim is saying that in God's inner life — the eternal love between Father, Son, and Spirit — there is no suffering, no grief, no emotional turmoil. The Trinitarian Persons exist in an eternal fellowship of blessedness that does not depend on anything outside of God. God's essential nature is joyful, self-sufficient, and complete.

But when God freely chooses to create a world and to enter into relationship with His creatures, something genuinely new happens. God takes on what Kim calls a "passive dimension" of emotional experience. He genuinely responds to what happens in the world — not because He must, but because He freely chooses to. The suffering of God, on Kim's model, is real but freely chosen, temporal but genuine, responsive but not destabilizing.⁵⁸

Kim calls his constructive proposal the "dynamic reciprocity model." This model affirms that there is a genuine back-and-forth between God and His creatures. God acts on the world, and the world genuinely affects God — not in His essential nature, but in His relational engagement. This reciprocity is dynamic — it changes and develops over time — and it is real, not merely apparent.⁵⁹

One of Kim's most helpful insights is his analysis of how Frame and Pinnock — two evangelical theologians who come from very different theological traditions — both arrive at mediating positions, though by different paths. Pinnock, coming from the Open Theism tradition, emphasizes God's relationality and self-limitation as the basis for divine passibility. Frame, coming from the Reformed tradition, emphasizes God's lordship and eternal decree as the basis for understanding God's emotional life. Yet both affirm that God genuinely experiences emotions — both active and passive dimensions. Kim uses this convergence to argue that the mediating position is not the preserve of any single theological tradition but represents a growing consensus across the evangelical spectrum.

Kim's Trinitarian framework is a genuine contribution to the discussion. By anchoring God's impassibility in the immanent Trinity and God's passibility in the economic Trinity, Kim provides a theologically grounded way to hold both truths together. I find his approach deeply helpful, though I wonder whether the distinction between the immanent and economic Trinity can be drawn quite as sharply as Kim draws it. If the immanent Trinity really is the same God as the economic Trinity (as Rahner's Rule suggests), then can we so neatly separate God's inner life from His engagement with the world? This is a question I will return to in Chapter 27, when we discuss the Trinity and divine emotion in more depth.

Graham Cole: "Biblically Qualified Impassibility"

Graham Cole, writing in Andrew Schmutzer's edited volume Divine Suffering (2023), proposes what he calls "biblically qualified impassibility."⁶⁰ Cole's approach is to take the classical doctrine of impassibility and qualify it — carefully, deliberately — in light of the biblical evidence.

Cole agrees with the classical tradition that God is not subject to involuntary passions. God is not at the mercy of emotional forces beyond His control. In this sense, the traditional doctrine is right: God is impassible. But Cole also takes seriously the biblical data — the hundreds of passages that portray God as genuinely loving, grieving, rejoicing, and responding to His creatures. These are not mere figures of speech. They point to something real in God's experience. So the classical doctrine needs to be qualified by Scripture: God is impassible in the sense that He is not subject to involuntary, destabilizing emotions, but He is passible in the sense that He genuinely responds to His creatures with appropriate, purposeful, and sovereign affections.⁶¹

Cole's approach has the virtue of simplicity and clarity. He is not trying to build an elaborate theological system. He is simply saying: let the Bible have the last word. If Scripture portrays God as emotional, then our doctrine of impassibility must be qualified to accommodate that portrayal. This is an instinct I deeply share.

John Peckham: "Qualified Passibility"

John Peckham, in his important study The Love of God: A Canonical Model (2015) and in his article on "qualified passibility," comes at the question from the other direction. While scholars like Lister and Cole start with impassibility and qualify it, Peckham starts with passibility and qualifies it.⁶²

Peckham argues that God is genuinely passible — genuinely affected by and responsive to His creatures. He is moved by our prayers. He grieves over our sin. He rejoices when we repent. He is genuinely hurt when His love is rejected. This is not a deficiency but a perfection — it is what it means for God to be love.

But Peckham qualifies this passibility in crucial ways. God's passibility does not compromise His sovereignty, His goodness, or His essential nature. God is not overwhelmed by His emotions. He is not destabilized by evil. He is not dependent on the world for His existence or His joy. God's emotional responsiveness is real but always under His own sovereign control.⁶³

Peckham offers two primary reasons for rejecting the term "impassibility" altogether, even in a qualified sense: first, the insufficient biblical support for the concept (there is no passage of Scripture that teaches God is impassible), and second, the "confusion and diversity of meanings associated with this term in past and present theology."⁶⁴ Better, Peckham argues, to simply call God what the Bible calls Him: a God who loves, who grieves, who rejoices, who is affected — and to qualify that passibility with the biblical affirmation that God is also sovereign, wise, and self-sufficient.

Where Does the Author Stand?

Having surveyed the contemporary evangelical landscape, I want to state clearly where I stand in this conversation. My position is closest to those of Lister and Peckham, and it draws on several key sources: Mullins's philosophical arguments (which we will engage in depth in Chapters 22–24), Lamb's comprehensive biblical evidence (Chapters 11–21), Kim's Trinitarian framework (Chapter 27), and Sirvent's moral argument about the connection between emotional vulnerability and genuine love (Chapter 31).

Here is my position in summary:

God genuinely feels. He truly loves, truly grieves, truly rejoices, truly burns with righteous anger. His emotional responses to His creatures are not mere metaphors, not mere anthropomorphisms, not merely the language of divine accommodation. They point to something genuinely real in God's experience. God is affected by what happens in the world — He is moved by our prayers, wounded by our sin, delighted by our worship, and grieved when we suffer.

But God's emotions never overwhelm, destabilize, or control Him. He is not ruled by His passions the way human beings so often are. His anger is always righteous, measured, and purposeful. His grief never paralyzes Him. His love never becomes indulgent or enabling. God is sovereign over His emotional life. In this narrow, carefully qualified sense — and this sense only — I affirm a form of impassibility.

In other words, I am what Peckham would call a "qualified passibilist" and what Lister would call an advocate of an "impassible and impassioned" God. I believe both labels are trying to capture the same essential truth: God genuinely feels, but God's feelings are always perfectly appropriate, always under His sovereign control, and always expressions of His holy character.

Let me explain how my position relates to each of the mediating proposals we have surveyed.

With Lister, I affirm the "impassible and impassioned" framework — the insight that God is both invulnerable to emotional manipulation and genuinely passionate about His creatures. But I lean more passibilist than Lister. Where Lister tends to emphasize the "impassible" side of the equation, I want to give equal or perhaps slightly greater emphasis to the "impassioned" side. The biblical portrait of God is not primarily one of emotional invulnerability but of extravagant, costly, self-giving love that genuinely risks being wounded.

With Kim, I appreciate the Trinitarian distinction between God's impassible inner life and His passible engagement with creation. The "dynamic reciprocity model" is a genuinely helpful framework. But I worry that Kim's distinction between the immanent and economic Trinity may be drawn too sharply. If God's engagement with creation reveals something true about who God eternally is (as I believe it does), then we cannot neatly partition God's emotional life into an impassible "inside" and a passible "outside."

With Cole, I share the conviction that impassibility must be qualified by Scripture. Cole's instinct is exactly right: let the Bible have the last word. If over four hundred passages describe God's emotional engagement with His creatures (as we will document in Chapter 11), then our theological categories must accommodate that evidence, not explain it away.

With Peckham, I am closest of all. Peckham's "qualified passibility" captures my position precisely: God is genuinely passible — genuinely affected, genuinely responsive, genuinely moved — but in a way that never compromises His sovereignty, goodness, or essential nature. I also share Peckham's concern that the term "impassibility" may carry too much historical baggage to be salvageable.⁶⁶

Where I draw on Mullins, it is primarily for the philosophical arguments that expose the internal problems with classical impassibility. As we will see in Chapter 22, Mullins's "unity problem" demonstrates that strict impassibility is incompatible with genuine divine love. In Chapter 23, we will examine his devastating four-step wrath argument, which shows that the impassibilist position is internally incoherent when it comes to God's anger at sin. And in Chapter 24, we will engage his analysis of the "creepy emotions" problem, which raises important questions about divine empathy. These philosophical arguments powerfully complement the biblical evidence.

Where I draw on Sirvent, it is for the moral argument. As we will see in Chapter 31, Sirvent makes a compelling case that emotional vulnerability is constitutive of genuine love and justice. If God is impassible — if He is completely invulnerable to being affected by His creatures — then He is not the kind of being who genuinely loves. And if God is not the kind of being who genuinely loves, then He is not worth imitating. The imitatio Dei argument is a powerful challenge to strict impassibility that deserves careful attention.

Why the Mediating Positions Are Gaining Ground

I believe the mediating positions are gaining ground in evangelical theology for several interconnected reasons.

First, the biblical evidence is simply overwhelming. As we will document in detail in Part IV of this book (Chapters 11–21), the Bible portrays God as a deeply emotional being from beginning to end. God loves, grieves, rejoices, burns with anger, feels jealousy, shows compassion, hates evil, and exercises patience. These are not occasional, incidental descriptions. They are pervasive, central, and structurally important to the biblical narrative. Over four hundred passages describe God's emotional engagement with His creatures. No honest reading of Scripture can dismiss all of this as mere metaphor.⁶⁷

Second, better historical work has shown that the classical tradition itself was more nuanced than either its modern defenders or its modern critics have recognized. As we saw in Chapter 7, the Church Fathers did not teach a simple, flat impassibility that denied all emotion to God. They held what Paul Gavrilyuk has called an "apophatic qualifier" — a way of saying what God is not (subject to involuntary, destabilizing passions) without saying what God is not (without genuine emotional engagement).⁶⁸

Third, the philosophical arguments against strict impassibility have become increasingly powerful. Mullins's work in particular has exposed serious internal contradictions in the classical position — contradictions that cannot be resolved without modifying the doctrine (as we will see in Chapters 22–24). Similarly, Sirvent's moral argument has shown that strict impassibility is not just philosophically problematic but morally problematic — it gives us a God who is not the kind of being that Scripture calls us to imitate.

Fourth, the cross demands it. At the cross of Christ, God entered into the deepest suffering imaginable. The Son of God bore the sins of the world. I believe — and will argue at length in Chapter 26 — that more than just the human nature of Christ suffered at Calvary. The divine Son genuinely experienced the agony of the cross. The Father genuinely anguished over the death of His beloved Son. The Spirit genuinely groaned. If the cross reveals the heart of God (and I believe it does), then the heart of God is not an impassible fortress of undisturbed bliss. It is a heart that is broken open by love.

Fifth, pastoral necessity drives the mediating position. The people in our pews — the mothers burying children, the cancer patients praying for healing, the abuse survivors asking where God was — need to know that God is not watching their pain from a state of unaffected serenity. They need to know that He hurts with them, weeps with them, and is moved to action on their behalf. The mediating position provides the theological foundation for that pastoral assurance. As we will explore in Chapter 33, the doctrine of God's emotional life has enormous implications for how we preach, pray, counsel, and worship.

Sixth, the moral argument is increasingly compelling. As Sirvent has argued at length in Embracing Vulnerability, emotional vulnerability is not a deficiency but a moral perfection. A being who genuinely loves must be willing to be affected by the beloved. A judge who genuinely cares about justice must be moved by injustice. A parent who genuinely cherishes a child must grieve when that child suffers. If emotional vulnerability is constitutive of love, justice, and compassion — and if God is the supreme exemplar of all three — then God must be emotionally vulnerable. An impassible God, on this view, is a morally deficient God — not because He lacks power, but because He lacks the relational engagement that genuine love requires.⁷² This moral argument, combined with the biblical evidence and the philosophical critiques, creates a cumulative case that is increasingly difficult for strict impassibilists to resist.

Seventh, and perhaps most fundamentally, the mediating positions are gaining ground because they do the best job of honoring all the biblical data. The strict impassibilist has to explain away hundreds of passages that portray God as genuinely emotional. The strict passibilist risks losing the biblical affirmations of God's sovereignty, self-sufficiency, and unchanging character. The mediating positions — by affirming both that God genuinely feels and that God's feelings are always under His sovereign control — can do justice to both sets of data without having to minimize either one. This is what makes the mediating approach so attractive to evangelicals, who are committed above all to the authority of Scripture. The position that best accounts for all the evidence — the full range of biblical testimony, the legitimate concerns of the classical tradition, and the philosophical and moral arguments — is the position that deserves our allegiance. And I believe that position is the qualified passibility (or qualified impassibility — the labels point to the same reality) that this book defends.

The Road Ahead

This chapter has mapped the contemporary evangelical landscape on divine impassibility. We have seen that the landscape is not a monolith but a lively, multifaceted conversation. At one end stand the strong affirmers — Bray, Helm, Dolezal — who defend the classical tradition with conviction and rigor. At the other end stand the rejecters — Stott, Feinberg, Grudem — who believe impassibility must be abandoned. In the middle stand the modifiers — Frame, Erickson — and the mediating voices — Lister, Kim, Cole, Peckham — who are doing the most creative and most promising work.

What is most striking about this landscape is the trajectory. The center of gravity in evangelical theology is clearly moving toward the mediating positions. The strict classical view, while still vigorously defended by a handful of scholars, is increasingly a minority position. The outright rejection of impassibility is also giving way to more nuanced approaches. What is emerging is a growing evangelical consensus — not yet fully formed, but clearly visible — that God is genuinely emotional, genuinely responsive, and genuinely affected by His creatures, while also being sovereign, wise, and self-sufficient in His essential nature.⁶⁹

In the chapters that follow, we will build the case for this mediating position. In Part IV (Chapters 11–21), we will examine the overwhelming biblical evidence for God's emotional life. In Part V (Chapters 22–27), we will engage the philosophical and systematic challenges. In Part VI (Chapters 28–30), we will consider what divine passibility means for the problem of evil. And in Part VII (Chapters 31–35), we will draw out the practical implications for the Christian life.

The question before us is not merely academic. It touches the deepest longings of the human heart. Is the God we worship a God who genuinely cares? Is He moved by our prayers? Does He hurt when we hurt? Does He celebrate when we celebrate? The answer — the answer that I believe the Bible gives us, the answer that the best of the theological tradition has always hinted at, and the answer that a growing number of evangelical scholars are now articulating with increasing clarity — is yes. Yes, God genuinely feels. Yes, God is truly affected by His creatures. Yes, God's heart beats with love, aches with sorrow, and burns with holy fire for every person He has made.

And that changes everything.