Part V: Philosophical and Systematic Challenges

Chapter 22

Divine Love and the Problem of Impassibility

Can an Unfeeling God Truly Love?

Part V: Philosophical and Systematic Challenges

Introduction: From Biblical Data to Philosophical Argument

In Chapter 12, we walked through the overwhelming biblical evidence for God's love. We saw that the Old Testament uses three different Hebrew words for divine love — 'ahav (אהב), hasaq (חשק), and hesed (חסד) — each painting a picture of a God who loves passionately, faithfully, and tenderly. We traced God's love from His choice of Israel ("The LORD set his love on you," Deuteronomy 7:7) through the prophetic literature (Hosea's aching portrayal of a God who cannot give up on His people), through the Psalms (hesed enduring forever in every verse of Psalm 136), and into the New Testament, where the apostle John makes the staggering declaration that "God is love" (1 John 4:8). We found a God who does not merely act lovingly as a matter of policy. We found a God who loves — deeply, passionately, and relentlessly.

But now we need to press deeper. The biblical data gives us the what — God loves. But a philosophical question lurks beneath the surface that demands our attention: Can the impassible God truly love? If God cannot be moved or affected by anything outside Himself, if His inner life is a state of undisturbed bliss that nothing in creation can touch, then what does it even mean to say He "loves" us? Is divine love — on the strict classical model — really love at all? Or is it something else entirely — something that wears the clothing of love but lacks its heartbeat?

This chapter engages the philosophical arguments. We will focus especially on what the philosopher R. T. Mullins calls "the Unity Problem" — a powerful argument that exposes a deep internal tension between impassibility and love. I believe the Unity Problem is one of the most compelling philosophical arguments against strict impassibility, and it deserves our careful attention. If the argument succeeds — and I believe it does — then the strict impassibilist faces a devastating choice: either God cannot truly love, or God is not truly impassible. Since the Bible leaves no room to deny that God truly loves, the only option left is to abandon strict impassibility.¹

Before we dig into the argument, I want to be clear about what this chapter is not doing. I am not arguing against every form of impassibility. As I have said throughout this book, I believe there is a qualified sense in which God is impassible — His emotions never overwhelm, destabilize, or control Him. What I am arguing against is strict classical impassibility: the view that God cannot be moved or affected by anything outside Himself and that His inner life is a single, unchanging state of perfect bliss. It is this strong version that creates the tension with divine love. And it is this strong version that the Unity Problem targets.²

The Uninfluenced Love of the Impassible God

To be fair to the classical tradition, we need to begin by understanding how strict impassibilists think about divine love. On the strict classical view, God's love is entirely self-generated. It is not a response to anything in creatures. God does not love us because of anything about us — not because of our beauty, our worthiness, our goodness, or even our need. God loves us because of His own eternal, unchanging nature. He would love us exactly the same way whether we responded to that love or not, whether we flourished or suffered, whether we existed or not. His love is uninfluenced by anything ad extra — that is, anything outside of God Himself.³

This view has a long and distinguished pedigree. In more Reformed traditions, there has been a strong emphasis on God's love being completely uninfluenced. D. A. Carson, commenting on Deuteronomy 7:7–10, explains that God did not choose Israel because they were "choice." Rather, God set His affection on them simply because He loved them. Carson frames it this way: God loved them because He loved them, and one cannot probe further back than that.⁴ Now, this might seem harmless enough at first glance. But notice what is being claimed: there is nothing about Israel that influenced God's decision to love them. Not their need. Not their potential. Not even foreseen excellence. God simply declared that He would love them, and that declaration has nothing to do with them.

The classical theist Arthur Pink pushes this even further. Pink considers what would happen if God's love were regulated by something external to His will. If that were the case, Pink argues, God would be "ruled by law" — His love would be under some external principle rather than flowing from His own sovereign freedom. Pink appeals to Ephesians 1:4–5, where Paul says that God predestined us "according to the good pleasure of His will" — not according to any foreseen excellency in us. For Pink, God's love is completely and utterly uninfluenced by anything outside of God.⁵

We should present this position fairly. It has real strengths. First, it grounds divine love in God's nature rather than in our worthiness. We do not have to earn God's love. We do not have to be "good enough" to deserve it. God's love is not a reward for performance; it is a gift flowing from His character. Second, it preserves God's sovereignty. If God's love depends on nothing outside Himself, then nothing can thwart it, nothing can diminish it, and nothing can shake its foundation. These are beautiful truths, and any adequate theology of divine love must preserve them.

But here is the problem. The classical tradition does not stop with saying that God's love is not dependent on our worthiness — which is true and important. It goes further and says that God's love is not responsive to us at all. And that is a very different claim. Herman Bavinck, a towering figure in Reformed theology, makes this explicit. For Bavinck, God's self-love does not include loving the value of creatures as creatures. The impassible God only loves the value of His own perfect nature. Creatures can participate in that nature — they can benefit from it — but God is not responding to anything in or about the creature when He loves.⁶

This is a question that passibilists have been pressing for decades, and I think it is a question that the strict classical tradition struggles to answer. John Peckham, whose model of "qualified passibility" I find compelling, has argued that the impassibilist's biblical exegesis here actually overstates the case. The Bible does not present God's love as utterly unresponsive to creatures. On the contrary, the biblical portrait is of a God whose love is genuinely interactive — a God who pursues, who woos, who grieves over rejection, and who rejoices over repentance.⁷ We do not have to choose between a love that is grounded in God's character and a love that is responsive to creatures. Both can be true at the same time. In fact, I believe both must be true for love to be genuinely love.

The neoclassical theist sees things very differently from the strict impassibilist. She agrees that God's love flows from His character. But she also insists that God genuinely considers the values of His creatures. God's decision to create, to save, and to redeem is informed by His knowledge of what is good for His creatures. The neoclassical theist does not see this as some external law that rules God. Rather, she sees it as part of what it means for God to be loving and wise.⁸ Because God is perfectly good, He cannot create a universe overwhelmed by evil. Because God is perfectly loving, He cannot remain indifferent to the suffering of those He has made. His own character — not some external force — drives His responsive engagement with creation.

It is important to see how this difference plays out in real theological reflection. On the strict impassibilist model, God's love is like a lighthouse beam. It shines steadily and unchangingly, regardless of what happens on the sea below. Ships may wreck and sailors may drown, but the beam does not flicker. It does not adjust. It does not respond. It simply shines. Now, a lighthouse is a good thing. But we would never say the lighthouse loves the sailors. It helps them — but it does not care about them. The neoclassical theist, by contrast, pictures God's love more like a parent watching a child take her first steps. The parent is not merely emitting a constant beam of goodwill. The parent is engaged — leaning forward, hands outstretched, ready to catch, delighting in every wobbly step, anxious when the child teeters, joyful when she finds her balance. The parent's emotional state is genuinely responsive to the child's condition. That is what we mean by love. And that is what the strict impassibilist denies of God.

Terence Fretheim, whose work on Old Testament divine suffering has been deeply influential, has argued that the God of the Old Testament is pervasively portrayed as a God who is genuinely affected by the condition of His people. God does not merely observe Israel's suffering in Egypt — He hears their cries, sees their affliction, and is moved to act (Exodus 3:7–8). The Hebrew verbs here are active, emotional, and responsive. This is not the language of a lighthouse. It is the language of a parent whose child is in danger.^8b

What Is Love? The Search for Common Ground

So we have two competing visions of God's love. The classical theist says that God's love is completely unresponsive to the value of creatures. The neoclassical theist says that God's love is responsive to the value of creatures. Which understanding is to be preferred? At this point, it might seem like we have reached a stalemate. Each side will favor its own definition, and we will just go in circles.

Fortunately, as Mullins observes, some common ground can be found.⁹ The classical theist Eric Silverman, along with other thinkers in the tradition, explains that love involves two desires. First, love involves a desire for the good of the beloved — you want the person you love to flourish, to be well, to have what is genuinely good for them. Second, love involves a desire for union with the beloved — you want closeness, connection, intimacy, a genuine togetherness with the person you love.¹⁰ For the sake of argument, the passibilist can grant the impassibilist that love involves these two desires. And with this common ground, we can press the conversation forward.

But before we do, we should step back and ask a broader question: What is love? Philosophers have proposed several accounts, and every single one of them creates tension with strict impassibility. Let me briefly survey the major views.

Love as concern for the welfare of the beloved. On this view, to love someone is to genuinely care about their well-being. When they suffer, you are pained. When they flourish, you are glad. Their condition matters to you — not just intellectually but emotionally. You are not indifferent to whether they are thriving or dying. Can the impassible God satisfy this condition? Only if we stretch the word "concern" until it breaks. A being whose inner life is unaffected by the beloved's condition does not seem to care about the beloved in any meaningful sense — He may act for the beloved's good, but acting without caring is benevolence, not love.¹¹

Love as valuing the beloved. On this view, to love someone is to see them as genuinely valuable — to prize them, to treasure them, to regard them as mattering. But if God's love is entirely unresponsive to the value of creatures — if, as the strict classical tradition insists, God only loves the value of His own nature — then God does not truly value us. We are not treasured for who we are. We are merely occasions through which God's self-love happens to operate.¹²

Love as union or identification with the beloved. This view, which Eleonore Stump has developed in significant detail, holds that love involves a shared identity — the lover's well-being becomes tied up with the well-being of the beloved. When harm befalls the beloved, harm also befalls the lover. If the beloved fares well, the lover fares well. But this obviously requires being affected by the beloved's condition — which is precisely what impassibility denies.¹³

Love as desire for the good of the beloved. This is the view that both classical and neoclassical theists tend to affirm as common ground. But even here, tension arises. A desire is, by definition, a state in which you want something that is not yet fully realized. You desire the beloved's good because it is not yet fully achieved. But on strict impassibility, God has no unsatisfied desires. God is perfectly satisfied in Himself. Classical theists tend to deny that God even has desires directed toward creatures, because desires imply that something outside God could affect Him.¹⁴

Mullins rightly points out the difficulty here. It is hard to see how a timeless and immutable God could satisfy a desire of love, because desire satisfaction clearly involves change — from having a desire to satisfying a desire. A classical theist might try to say that God "analogically" has desires. But the idea of timelessly and immutably having a desire that is also timelessly and immutably satisfied does not sound like an analogical use of the word "desire." It sounds incoherent. This is why most classical theists end up denying that God has desires at all — which makes the whole discussion of love's desires a nonstarter.¹⁵

The Desires of Love: A Closer Look

Let me spend a little more time on the two desires of love, because they are the foundation for the Unity Problem. In her important work Wandering in Darkness, the classical theist Eleonore Stump develops one of the most careful accounts of what love's desires actually involve.¹⁶

The first desire is the desire for the good of the beloved. "Goodness" here is used broadly. It covers moral goods (becoming more virtuous, more wise, more kind), physical goods (health, strength, well-being), relational goods (deep friendships, loving family), and spiritual goods (knowing God, growing in holiness). The good of the beloved is objective — there is something genuinely good for a person based on her nature. As Stump puts it, it is that which truly is in the interest of the beloved and which truly does lead to the beloved's flourishing.¹⁷

Think about this in ordinary human experience. A set of parents loves their daughter. Part of that love means they want what is genuinely good for her. So they help her with her homework, encourage her talents, comfort her when she is hurting, discipline her when she is going down a destructive path. All of this is driven by a desire for her good. Now here is the key question: is this desire responsive to the daughter's actual condition? Of course it is. The parents comfort her because she is hurting. They discipline her because she is veering off course. If the parents were completely unresponsive to the daughter's condition — if they provided the exact same comfort and discipline regardless of whether she was thriving or suffering — we would rightly question whether their love was genuine.

The second desire is the desire for union with the beloved. Union is not just being in the same room. It involves two things: personal presence and mutual closeness. Personal presence is a necessary condition for mutual closeness, and it comes in degrees. You can be physically present with someone without being emotionally or personally present. And mutual closeness — the deeper component of union — requires something more. It requires that both parties open themselves to each other. It requires understanding, empathy, and willingness to be vulnerable.¹⁸

This is where things get particularly interesting — and particularly difficult — for the impassibilist. Mutual closeness requires that the lover be able to comprehend the beloved's inner life. Not just know facts about it. Not just have a list of propositions describing it. But really understand it — from the inside, as it were. As the philosopher Linda Zagzebski puts it, love is premised on understanding the other, and the fuller the understanding, the greater the possibility for love.¹⁹ Can the impassible God really understand the inner life of a suffering creature? That is the question at the heart of the Unity Problem.

There is also a crucial element of vulnerability involved in mutual closeness. Stump observes that a person makes herself vulnerable to the beloved in the very act of opening up. In revealing your innermost thoughts to someone, you are demonstrating your desire for union with that person. The satisfaction of that desire is now in the beloved's hands. The beloved might accept you — or the beloved might reject what she sees. This is the risk that love inherently involves. And it raises the question: can the impassible God, who by definition cannot be affected by anything external, ever make Himself genuinely vulnerable to His creatures?²⁰

The Unity Problem: The Heart of the Chapter

Now we arrive at the central argument of this chapter. Mullins calls it "the Unity Problem," and I believe it is one of the most powerful philosophical challenges to strict impassibility in the contemporary literature. The argument goes like this: if love requires union with the beloved, and union requires mutual closeness, and mutual closeness requires deep comprehension of the beloved's inner life, then the impassible God cannot satisfy the conditions of union — and therefore cannot fully love His creatures.²¹

Let me walk through the argument step by step.

Stump makes it clear that unity and mutual closeness can be helped or hindered by the nature of the parties involved. There might be something about Sally that prevents her from drawing closer to God — maybe a terrible sin she refuses to repent of, or maybe a deep wound that makes it hard for her to trust. But here is the question the passibilist raises: What about the other way around? What if there is something about God — specifically, about the impassible God — that prevents Him from being truly united to us?²²

The classical theist will object immediately: there is nothing "wrong" with the impassible God! But the passibilist begs to differ. According to Stump's own framework, the intrinsic characteristics of the lovers determine the character and extent of union that is possible between them. And the passibilist argues that the impassible God is going to be severely limited in the possible extent of His union with creatures compared to a passible, empathetic God.²³

Why? Because a lover cannot be fully unified with her beloved if she does not have the deepest possible understanding of her beloved. And as we shall see, the impassible God is prevented from having this understanding in at least two crucial ways.

The Impassible God Cannot Comprehend Suffering

The first problem is this: the impassible God cannot comprehend what it is like to suffer. And a lover who cannot understand the beloved's pain is deficient in love.²⁴

Consider an example that Mullins develops with great care. Imagine a woman named Sally. Sally has a son named Ben. She loves Ben with the fierce, gut-deep love that a mother has for her child. Her mental states include things like "I love my son Ben" and "I would do anything for Ben." Ben is currently suffering from cancer. He is on death's door. Naturally, Sally is in emotional anguish. She is deeply disturbed by what is happening to her son because she has placed an enormous amount of emotional weight — what we might call subjective value — on her relationship with Ben.²⁵

Now, can the impassible God know all the facts about Sally and her situation? Of course. An omniscient, impassible God knows every proposition about Sally. He knows that she has a son named Ben. He knows that Ben has cancer. He knows that Sally is in anguish. He knows, in propositional terms, what her mental and emotional states are. But here is the critical question: Can the impassible God be united in love with Sally?

The answer, Mullins argues, is no. And the reason is that mere propositional knowledge is not enough for the kind of comprehension that mutual closeness requires. Knowledge of what it is like to be Sally is also needed — and an impassible God cannot have that kind of knowledge.

Think about it this way. The impassible God cannot suffer. He is necessarily in a state of undisturbed bliss. It is not just that He happens not to suffer — it is that suffering is metaphysically impossible for Him. Perfect blessedness, as the classical tradition defines it, excludes everything contrary to happiness. As the 19th-century theologian Marshall Randles explained, any happiness mixed with unhappiness would be imperfect blessedness. The impassible God cannot have any hint of uneasiness, conflict, weakness, limitation, or sorrow in His emotional life, because such things are incompatible with perfect blessedness. Any experiential knowledge of suffering, Randles insisted, would be a loss of inherent excellence and is therefore impossible for a being who is absolutely perfect.²⁶

So the impassible God is a God who cannot comprehend what it is like to be Sally in her suffering. He can know all the facts. But He cannot feel what she feels. He cannot enter into her anguish. He cannot understand — from the inside — what it means to watch your child die. And comprehension of Sally's emotional states is necessary for mutual closeness. Without it, the impassible God's love for Sally is limited in its depth, and their union is incomplete.²⁷

The classical theist will respond: "But God has propositional omniscience! He knows every fact about Sally's suffering. What more could be needed?" And this is where the debate over experiential knowledge becomes crucial — a topic treated at length in Chapter 4. Here we need only note the key point. There is a kind of knowledge that cannot be reduced to propositions. It is the knowledge you gain by experiencing something. No amount of reading about the taste of chocolate can substitute for actually tasting chocolate. No amount of studying grief in a textbook can substitute for actually grieving. If God has never — and can never — experience anything like suffering, then there is a dimension of Sally's inner life that remains forever beyond His comprehension.²⁸

And if there is a dimension of Sally's inner life that is beyond God's comprehension, then God's union with Sally is limited. And if God's union with Sally is limited, then God's love for Sally — by the classical theist's own standards of what love involves — is less than it could be. A passible God, by contrast, can satisfy these conditions. A God who genuinely enters into His creatures' suffering — who feels with them, who is moved by their pain — has the deepest possible understanding of what they are going through. As Zagzebski argues, the omnisubjective God is the most intimately loving because He is the most intimately knowing.²⁹

The Impassible God Cannot Be Moved

There is a second reason that the impassible God cannot achieve full mutual closeness with His creatures — and it is, if anything, even more devastating than the first. The impassible God cannot be moved.³⁰

Remember what we learned in Chapter 3: it is metaphysically impossible for the impassible God to be moved or acted upon by anything outside of God. His emotional state of perfect happiness is based entirely on Himself. Since the impassible God's emotional state is purely and entirely self-referential, it is metaphysically impossible for Him to comprehend what it is like to have one's emotional states wrapped up in another person.

Go back to Sally. Sally's emotional life is deeply invested in her son Ben. Her joy depends, in part, on Ben's well-being. Her anguish comes from Ben's suffering. Her emotional states are wrapped up in another person — and that is a normal, natural, and good aspect of human love. When you love someone, their condition affects your emotional state. You cannot love deeply without becoming emotionally invested in the beloved's well-being.

But the impassible God cannot be emotionally invested in another person. As Randles explains, "The happiness of God is from the perfection of His nature independently of all other beings ... it is not in the power of the creature to spoil or diminish His infinite blessedness." Stephen Charnock adds that it is impossible for creatures to add to or subtract from the infinite blessedness of God.³¹ These are not careless statements by minor theologians. These are careful assertions by some of the classical tradition's greatest minds. And they mean exactly what they say: nothing we do, nothing that happens to us, nothing in all of creation can affect God's emotional state in any way.

The impassible God, then, cannot possibly comprehend what it is like for Sally to place the emotional weight she does on her son Ben, because it is metaphysically impossible for God to have His emotional states depend on something external to the divine nature. It is metaphysically impossible for the impassible God to be emotionally invested in another person, because such an investment would make God's emotional life dependent on something outside of Himself — which is precisely what impassibility forbids.³²

This is not a caricature. This is what strict impassibility actually entails. The impassible God lives in a state of perfect, self-contained bliss that is utterly unresponsive to creaturely reality. Your suffering does not register in His experience. Your joy does not increase His delight. Your rebellion does not grieve Him. Your repentance does not bring Him gladness. He is the same — perfectly happy, perfectly undisturbed — regardless of what happens to you.

And the question we must ask is: Is that love?

Responding to Possible Rejoinders

The Unity Problem arises from an internal conflict between impassibility and the desire for union with the beloved. The strict impassibilist will want to push back, and fairness requires that we consider the best possible responses.

Rejoinder 1: "God can understand suffering without experiencing it." The impassibilist might argue that the impassible God can understand what it is like to be Sally without God's ever having to experience suffering Himself. I find this suggestion deeply implausible. The impassible God is necessarily in a state of undisrupted and undisturbable joy. He has never experienced anything other than perfect bliss, and He cannot experience anything other than perfect bliss. To say that such a God can fully understand what it is like to be in anguish is like saying a person who has never tasted food and can never taste food fully understands the experience of tasting a fine meal. There is a kind of understanding — experiential understanding — that simply cannot exist without the relevant experience.³³

Rejoinder 2: "The Incarnation solves the problem." A more sophisticated response is to point to the Incarnation. "God did experience suffering — in Christ!" This is an important point, and we will address the Incarnation in much greater depth in Chapter 26. But for now, we can note two things. First, many classical theists want to restrict Christ's suffering to His human nature, keeping the divine nature impassible. If only the human nature suffered, then the divine nature — God as God — still has no experiential knowledge of suffering. Second, even if the Incarnation gives God experiential knowledge of suffering (which I believe it does), the question remains: Was God capable of this kind of engagement before the Incarnation? If impassibility is an essential divine attribute, then God could never experience suffering, even in the Incarnation — which creates Christological problems of its own. Thomas Weinandy has argued that God can be said to "suffer" only in an analogical sense grounded in the Incarnation, not in God's intrinsic nature.³⁴ But if God's suffering in Christ is merely analogical, then we are back to the same problem: does God truly comprehend human suffering, or only analogically comprehend it?

Rejoinder 3: "God's love is different from human love." This is perhaps the most common classical theist response. Of course God's love is different from human love! God's love is divine, perfect, and infinite. Human love is finite, flawed, and often self-interested. We should not assume that God must love in the same way humans love. This response has a kernel of truth: God's love is certainly more than human love, not less. But the question is whether God's love is so different from what we mean by "love" that the word no longer applies. If God's "love" involves no concern that is responsive to the beloved's condition, no delight in the beloved's flourishing, no pain at the beloved's suffering, no desire for genuine reciprocal relationship — then what is left? We are calling it "love," but it bears no resemblance to anything we recognize as love. At that point, the word has become an empty label.³⁵

Rejoinder 4: "Anthropomorphism — we are projecting human emotions onto God." The impassibilist might say that we are making the mistake of projecting human emotional categories onto God. But as we argued at length in Chapter 6, this objection proves too much. If all the biblical language about God's love is merely anthropomorphic — merely our human way of describing something in God that is entirely unlike what we experience as love — then the same move can be made with any divine attribute. Is God's "goodness" merely our human way of describing something entirely unlike what we know as goodness? Is God's "wisdom" merely anthropomorphic? Is God's "justice"? At some point, if nothing we say about God corresponds to reality, we are left with a God about whom nothing meaningful can be said — which is theological nihilism, not theology. The anthropomorphism objection, if applied consistently, destroys all theological language, not just emotion language.³⁶

Love Rhymes with Sympathy

Mullins presses the case one step further with an argument he frames as "love rhymes with sympathy." The idea is simple but powerful: genuine love involves sympathy — feeling with the beloved. A God who cannot feel with us cannot love us in the fullest sense.³⁷

Think about what we instinctively recognize as deep love. When a mother sits beside her sick child's hospital bed, she does not merely act for the child's good (calling the doctor, administering medicine). She feels the child's pain. Her heart aches. She would take the illness on herself if she could. It is precisely this emotional engagement — this sympathy — that we recognize as the hallmark of deep love. A parent who efficiently managed their child's medical care without any emotional engagement would strike us as cold, detached, and — we would rightly say — deficient in love, no matter how competent their actions.

Zagzebski's work on omnisubjectivity is especially illuminating here. She has argued that a perfectly empathetic being — one who has maximal understanding of what it is like to be every conscious creature — would have the deepest possible capacity for love. Such a God would not merely know that you are suffering; He would know what it is like to be you in your suffering. He would feel with you — not in a way that overwhelms or destabilizes Him (this is where our qualified impassibility comes in), but in a way that constitutes genuine, deep, personal understanding of your experience.³⁸

But as Zagzebski herself acknowledges, omnisubjectivity is incompatible with impassibility. An impassible God is a being who is not moved by anything external. An omnisubjective God is moved — to some extent — by creation. God's empathic knowledge involves God having an empathic perceptual experience of another person. The passibilist is not merely saying that God understands Sally in some abstract sense that does not involve any emotional engagement. The passibilist is claiming that God has a deep emotional engagement with Sally — and that there are certain things about Sally that God simply cannot know without empathically experiencing her.³⁹

And here is the crucial insight: empathic knowledge, like experiential knowledge in general, is a form of knowledge by acquaintance. One cannot have such knowledge without being acquainted with the world in some way. A perfect copy of an emotion is an emotion. A perfect copy of pain is pain. If God has perfect empathic knowledge of a suffering creature, then God must — in some real sense — experience something analogous to that creature's suffering. And that is flatly incompatible with the impassibilist claim that God is in a state of perfect, undisturbed bliss that nothing in creation can touch.⁴⁰

Sirvent's Argument: Emotional Vulnerability as Constitutive of Love

The philosopher Roberto Sirvent has pushed this line of reasoning even further in his book Embracing Vulnerability: Human and Divine. Sirvent argues that emotional vulnerability is not merely a side effect of love — it is constitutive of love. That is, you cannot have genuine love without being emotionally vulnerable to the beloved. And if this is true, then an impassible God — a God who is by definition emotionally invulnerable — cannot truly love.⁴¹

Sirvent's argument draws on the philosophical literature on love that we have already surveyed, but he adds an important dimension. He shows that each major theory of love involves the lover being affected by the beloved's condition. On the robust concern account, the lover is deeply concerned for the beloved's welfare, and this concern means that the beloved's flourishing or suffering has a real emotional impact on the lover. On the value account, the lover treasures the beloved, which means that threats to the beloved's well-being generate genuine distress in the lover. On the union account, the lover's identity is partially constituted by the beloved, so that what happens to the beloved happens, in an important sense, to the lover as well.⁴²

The union account is especially powerful in this context. As Sirvent points out, when a lover identifies with the beloved, the lover develops new desires and interests that can only exist because of the relationship. The lover now cares about things she would never have cared about on her own — because the beloved cares about them. If the beloved is a musician, the lover develops an interest in music. If the beloved is passionate about justice, the lover's heart is stirred by injustice. And critically, if the beloved is suffering, the lover suffers too — not because suffering is imposed from outside, but because the lover's own identity now includes the beloved's well-being.⁴³

The philosopher William Lyons captures this well when he notes that for a person to love another, they must not merely evaluate the beloved as appealing. They must want certain things: to be with the beloved, to please the beloved, to cherish the beloved, and — crucially — to have the beloved return the love.⁴⁴ Love involves desire for reciprocity. It involves wanting to be wanted. And this desire for reciprocity creates vulnerability, because the beloved might not reciprocate. The beloved might reject the lover's self-offering. The beloved might be indifferent. This is the risk of love — and it is a risk that a truly loving God must be willing to take.

Sirvent develops the full imitatio Dei argument in detail — the argument that if God is our moral model, and God is impassible, then we should imitate God's impassibility, which leads to morally disastrous conclusions. That argument belongs to Chapter 31, and I will not reproduce it here. But the relevant point for our purposes is this: every adequate account of love involves being affected by the beloved. And a being who is utterly, metaphysically unaffectable cannot love.⁴⁵

The Role of Desire in Divine Love

Let me return to the question of desire, because it is a crucial piece of the puzzle. We noted earlier that love involves desires — the desire for the good of the beloved and the desire for union with the beloved. But on strict impassibility, God cannot have desires directed toward creatures.

Why not? Because desires, by their very nature, imply that something outside of God could affect Him. If God desires Sally's good, then Sally's condition — whether she is flourishing or suffering — makes a difference to God. If God desires union with Sally, then Sally's response — whether she opens herself to God or rejects Him — makes a difference to God. And if creaturely states and responses make a difference to God, then God is affected by something external — which is precisely what impassibility denies.⁴⁶

The classical theist is left with a difficult set of options. She can deny that God has desires — but then love (which requires desires) cannot be predicated of God. She can affirm that God has desires analogically — but the idea of a desire that is already eternally and immutably satisfied does not function like any desire we recognize. Or she can affirm that God truly has desires — but then she has abandoned impassibility.

Peckham's model of "qualified passibility" navigates this terrain more successfully. Peckham argues that God genuinely desires the good of His creatures and genuinely desires union with them. These desires are volitional — God freely chooses to love and be affected by His creatures. They are foreconditional — God's love is not conditioned on our worthiness but flows from His own character. And they are responsive — God's love genuinely interacts with and responds to what we do. This is not process theology; God is not compelled to respond. He freely and sovereignly chooses to be the kind of God who is genuinely affected by His creatures.⁴⁷

Carson and the Five Loves

D. A. Carson's important little book The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God provides a helpful framework for thinking about the complexity of divine love, even though Carson himself does not fully engage the passibility question. Carson identifies five distinct ways that the Bible speaks of God's love.⁴⁸

First, there is the intra-Trinitarian love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father, in the bond of the Holy Spirit. This love exists within God's own being and does not depend on creation. Second, there is God's providential love for all that He has made — His care for creation as a whole. Third, there is God's salvific love — His desire that all people be saved, expressed in passages like John 3:16 and 2 Peter 3:9. Fourth, there is God's particular electing love — His special choice of certain people or peoples for particular purposes. Fifth, there is God's conditional love — His love that is directed toward those who obey Him, linked to blessing and covenant faithfulness.

Carson's taxonomy is valuable because it shows that divine love is not one simple thing — it is a rich, multifaceted reality. But Carson's own analysis actually creates problems for the strict impassibilist. Consider his third category — God's desire that all people be saved. If God genuinely desires the salvation of all people, and some people are not saved, then God has an unsatisfied desire. An unsatisfied desire implies that something in creation (human rejection of God's offer) has resulted in a state of affairs that differs from what God desires. And if God's experience differs from what He desires — if there is a gap between what God wants and what actually happens — then God is affected by creaturely choices. Which is passibility.

Carson, to his credit, does not try to flatten this complexity. He acknowledges the tensions. But the strict impassibilist who takes Carson seriously must deal with the fact that several of Carson's categories seem to require a God who is genuinely responsive to, and genuinely affected by, the actions of His creatures. Intra-Trinitarian love may not require passibility. But salvific love, conditional love, and even electing love all seem to involve a God whose love responds to creaturely realities.⁴⁹

The Pastoral Devastation

I want to close the philosophical analysis by bringing it down to earth. Because this is not just a philosopher's puzzle. It is not just an academic exercise. The question of whether the impassible God can truly love has profound pastoral implications — and they are devastating.

Imagine a woman who has just lost her child. She is sitting in a hospital waiting room, shattered, barely able to breathe through the grief. A pastor comes alongside her and says: "God loves you. And God is completely unaffected by your pain. Your child's death has not registered in God's experience. He is in a state of perfect bliss right now — the same perfect bliss He was in before your child was born, the same perfect bliss He will be in for all eternity. Your agony has not disturbed that bliss even slightly. But He loves you."

Is that comfort? Would any grieving parent find solace in those words? I do not think so. And the reason is clear: what we call "love" simply does not look like that. Love that is completely unaffected by the beloved's suffering is not love in any sense that a hurting person could recognize or cling to.

Now imagine a different pastor comes alongside the same grieving mother and says: "God loves you. And His heart is broken right now — broken for you. He is weeping with you. Your child's death has grieved Him deeply, because He loved your child too. He knows what it feels like to watch a beloved child suffer and die — He watched His own Son die on the cross. And He will carry this grief alongside you. You are not alone in your pain."

The difference is total. And it is not merely a difference in pastoral style. It is a difference in theology. The first pastor is being faithful to strict impassibility. The second pastor is being faithful to the biblical portrait of a God who genuinely feels. Only one of these portraits can sustain a human being through the darkest night of their soul.⁵⁰

Lister's Contribution: Impassible and Impassioned

At this point I want to acknowledge an important mediating voice that has shaped my own thinking. Rob Lister, in his comprehensive study God Is Impassible and Impassioned, argues for a both/and position that holds together elements of impassibility and genuine divine emotion. Lister agrees with the passibilist that God truly feels — He is genuinely "impassioned." But Lister also wants to preserve the insight behind impassibility: God's emotions are never involuntary, never irrational, never destabilizing.⁵¹

Lister's approach is valuable, and I find myself in substantial agreement with his framework. But I want to press further than Lister does on the Unity Problem. Lister's account of divine emotion is rich and biblical, but it does not fully engage with the philosophical question of whether strict impassibility — the kind that denies any real change or responsiveness in God's inner life — is compatible with love. On this question, I believe Mullins's argument is decisive. The strict impassibilist, who denies that God is genuinely affected by His creatures in any way, cannot consistently affirm that God truly loves. Lister's mediating position works precisely because it abandons strict impassibility — it preserves the word "impassible" but fills it with a very different meaning than the classical tradition intended.⁵²

This brings us to J. I. Packer's oft-cited definition of impassibility, which is worth noting because it shows how far the "mediating" position has moved from the classical one. Packer defines impassibility as simply meaning that God's experiences do not come upon Him as ours come upon us — His are foreknown, willed, and chosen by Himself, not involuntary surprises forced on Him from outside.⁵³

Now, this is a perfectly reasonable theological claim. But notice what Packer is doing: he is redefining impassibility so thoroughly that most passibilists would happily agree with it! If "impassible" just means "not involuntarily surprised by emotions that are forced on Him," then virtually every responsible passibilist affirms impassibility. The question is whether the classical tradition meant anything more than that — and it clearly did. The classical tradition meant that God's inner life is utterly unresponsive to creatures, that His blessedness cannot be increased or diminished, and that nothing external can move Him in any way. Packer's redefinition is attractive, but it is a departure from the historical position, not a defense of it.

Toward a Biblical and Philosophical Resolution

Where does all of this leave us? I believe the case is strong — overwhelmingly strong — that strict impassibility is incompatible with divine love. Let me summarize the argument:

Step 1: Love requires, at minimum, a desire for the good of the beloved and a desire for union with the beloved. Both classical and neoclassical theists can agree on this common ground.

Step 2: Union with the beloved requires mutual closeness, which in turn requires deep comprehension of the beloved's inner life — not just propositional knowledge of facts about the beloved, but experiential understanding of what it is like to be the beloved.

Step 3: The impassible God cannot have experiential knowledge of suffering, because the impassible God is necessarily in a state of undisturbed bliss. Suffering is metaphysically impossible for Him. Therefore, the impassible God cannot fully comprehend the inner life of a suffering creature.

Step 4: The impassible God cannot be emotionally invested in another person, because emotional investment would make God's inner life dependent on something external — which impassibility forbids. Therefore, the impassible God cannot comprehend what it is like to love in the way that creatures love.

Step 5: Without full comprehension of the beloved's inner life, full mutual closeness is impossible. Without full mutual closeness, full union is impossible. Without full union, love is incomplete.

Step 6: Therefore, the impassible God's love for His creatures is necessarily limited — not by any deficiency in God's power, but by a deficiency in the metaphysical structure of impassibility, which prevents the kind of deep, empathetic engagement that love requires.

Step 7: A passible God — one who freely chooses to be genuinely affected by His creatures, who enters into their experience, who feels with them — can satisfy the conditions of love that the impassible God cannot. The passible God's love is deeper, richer, and more complete because it includes the dimensions of empathy, sympathy, and emotional investment that strict impassibility rules out.⁵⁴

Now, I want to be clear about what this argument does not prove. It does not prove that God is overwhelmed by His emotions, or that God is controlled by creaturely actions, or that God is dependent on creation for His essential nature and existence. All of these are errors of process theology (see Chapter 5). What the argument proves is that God — the sovereign, all-powerful, self-sufficient God — has freely chosen to be the kind of God who is genuinely affected by His creatures. His passibility is not a weakness; it is a perfection. It is what love looks like when it is divine. As the author of this book's companion volume on divine temporality has argued, genuine emotional responsiveness requires both temporality and passibility.⁵⁵ A timeless God who experiences no succession and cannot be affected by anything external is a God who cannot truly love — and the Bible will not allow us to worship such a God.

Connection to the Biblical Evidence

Before concluding, I want to briefly connect the philosophical argument of this chapter back to the biblical evidence we surveyed in earlier chapters. The Unity Problem is not just a philosopher's argument — it is confirmed and reinforced by Scripture at every turn.

When God says to Israel, "I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness" (Jeremiah 31:3, ESV), He is describing a love that acts — a love that draws, pursues, and seeks. This is not the static, unresponsive love of the impassible God. It is dynamic, active, and directed toward specific creatures in specific circumstances.

Consider also the Song of the Vineyard in Isaiah 5:1–7. God plants a vineyard, tends it carefully, builds a watchtower, digs a wine vat, and then waits expectantly for good grapes — only to find wild, sour grapes instead. The Hebrew verb qavah (קוה) — "he waited" or "he expected" — implies genuine anticipation, followed by genuine disappointment. "He expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry" (Isaiah 5:7, ESV). This is not the language of a being in a state of undisturbed bliss. This is the language of a God whose heart is invested in His vineyard — a God who expected something good and was genuinely disappointed when it did not come. (For the full exegesis of this passage, see Chapter 12.)

When Hosea portrays God as a heartbroken parent who cannot give up on his rebellious child — "How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? ... My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender" (Hosea 11:8, ESV) — we see a God whose love involves genuine inner turmoil. God's heart recoils within Him. His compassion grows warm. These are not the descriptions of a God in a state of undisturbed bliss. They are the descriptions of a God whose love makes Him genuinely vulnerable to the beloved's condition. (For the full exegesis of this passage, see Chapter 15.)

The parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32) is another striking example. When the father sees his wayward son returning home, the text says he was "filled with compassion" (splanchnizomai — σπλαγχνίζομαι) and ran to embrace him. The father does not stand impassively on the porch. He does not wait with cool indifference for the son to approach. He runs. He embraces. He weeps. He throws a party. And this, Jesus tells us, is what God is like when a sinner repents. This is a God whose joy is genuinely responsive to what His creatures do. (For the full treatment of Luke 15, see Chapter 14.)

When Jesus weeps at Lazarus's tomb (John 11:35) and sobs over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41–44), we see what divine love looks like in human flesh. And as we argued in Chapter 20, Jesus' emotions are not merely the feelings of a particularly devout human being — they are the feelings of God Incarnate. If God the Son weeps, then God weeps. If God the Son is moved with gut-wrenching compassion (splanchnizomai — σπλαγχνίζομαι — literally moved in the bowels), then God is moved with gut-wrenching compassion. The emotions of Jesus are a window into the heart of God — and that heart is anything but impassible.⁵⁶

Abraham Heschel, the great Jewish philosopher and theologian, captured this biblical vision beautifully with his concept of divine "pathos" — the idea that God is not self-contained perfection but a God who is intimately and emotionally affected by human actions. For Heschel, the prophets were not simply messengers delivering information from an aloof deity. They were witnesses to the inner life of a God who burns with passion, grieves with anguish, and loves with an intensity that defies our categories. The prophetic tradition, Heschel insisted, presents a God for whom the fate of His people is a matter of deepest personal concern — not merely a policy item on a divine agenda, but a heartache, a longing, a wound.^56b

And when the apostle John writes that "God is love" (1 John 4:8, 16), he is making a claim about God's essential nature. God does not merely do loving things. God does not merely have love as one attribute among many. God is love. Love is at the core of who God is. And if everything we have argued in this chapter is correct — that love requires being affected by the beloved, that love involves sympathy, vulnerability, and emotional investment — then a God whose essential nature is love must be a God who is genuinely, deeply, passionately affected by the creatures He has made.

Conclusion: The God Whose Love Is Real

We have covered a lot of ground in this chapter, so let me pull the threads together.

The strict classical impassibilist holds that God's love is entirely uninfluenced by anything outside of God. God's inner life is a state of perfect, undisturbed bliss that nothing in creation can affect. God does not need us, is not moved by us, and is not emotionally invested in us. He loves us — but His love looks nothing like what we normally mean by the word.

Against this, the Unity Problem shows that strict impassibility creates a fundamental barrier to divine love. If love requires union with the beloved, and union requires deep comprehension of the beloved's inner life, and the impassible God cannot comprehend suffering or be emotionally invested in another person, then the impassible God cannot satisfy the basic conditions of love. The argument is not that God must be exactly like a human lover — of course not. It is that God must have at least the capacity for empathy, sympathy, and genuine emotional engagement that love requires. And strict impassibility denies God this capacity.

I want to emphasize that this is not merely an academic conclusion. It touches the very heart of the Christian faith. If God is love — and the Bible says He is — then anything that undermines the genuineness of God's love undermines Christianity itself. The entire gospel is built on the claim that God loved the world so much that He gave His only Son (John 3:16). The entire story of redemption is driven by a love that will not let go, a love that crosses every boundary, a love that descends into death itself to bring the beloved home. If that love is not genuine — if it is merely a label we attach to a permanent, unchanging, unresponsive feature of God's nature that would be exactly the same whether we existed or not — then the gospel loses its power, and the cross loses its meaning. A God who is not truly moved by our condition is not truly motivated by love to save us. And if God is not motivated by love to save us, then what is the cross? Not a revelation of divine passion, but merely a mechanism — a cosmic transaction executed by an unmoved administrator. I cannot believe that. And I do not think Scripture asks us to.

Sirvent's argument adds a further dimension: emotional vulnerability is constitutive of love, not merely a side effect of it. Every adequate philosophical theory of love — whether it emphasizes concern, valuing, union, or desire for the good — involves the lover being affected by the beloved's condition. A being who is utterly, metaphysically unaffectable cannot love, period.

And the pastoral implications confirm the philosophical analysis. A God who is completely unaffected by human suffering cannot comfort the suffering. A God who is in a state of perfect bliss while His children are in agony is not a God that real people can turn to in their darkest moments. The biblical God — the God who weeps with those who weep, who is close to the brokenhearted, who enters into our pain and carries our sorrows — is the only God whose love can sustain a broken world.

In the next chapter, we will see an even more devastating argument against strict impassibility: Mullins's argument from divine wrath. If the Unity Problem shows that impassibility is in tension with love, the wrath argument will show that impassibility is internally incoherent — a fatal contradiction at the heart of the classical system. But for now, the point is clear enough: the God of the Bible is a God who truly loves. And a God who truly loves is a God who truly feels.⁵⁷