Part V: Philosophical and Systematic Challenges

Chapter 24

Divine Empathy and the Problem of "Creepy Emotions"

Introduction: The Strongest Objection?

We have been building a case throughout this book that God genuinely feels — that He loves, grieves, rejoices, and burns with righteous anger in response to His creatures. In Part IV, we walked through the biblical evidence for a rich and varied divine emotional life. In Chapters 22 and 23, we examined two powerful philosophical arguments against strict impassibility: Mullins's "unity problem" for divine love and his devastating wrath argument. Both arguments showed that the strict impassibilist position faces serious internal contradictions. A God who cannot be affected by anything outside Himself cannot truly love, and a God who has genuine wrath but denies being influenced by creatures is caught in a logical trap.

But now we need to turn the tables. We have been pressing the impassibilist for answers. In this chapter, the passibilist sits in the hot seat. And the question being asked is one of the most uncomfortable and provocative challenges in the entire debate: if God genuinely shares in the emotional experience of His creatures, does God experience all of their emotions — including the disturbing, the immoral, and the downright creepy ones?

Let me say something about how this chapter fits into the overall flow of Part V. Chapters 22 through 27 form a tightly connected unit of philosophical and systematic analysis. Chapter 22 showed that the impassibilist has a devastating problem with divine love — if God cannot be moved by His creatures, His "love" is hollow. Chapter 23 showed that the impassibilist has an equally devastating problem with divine wrath — if God literally has wrath but insists that creatures do not influence Him, the position collapses under its own weight. Those two chapters put the impassibilist on the defensive. Now, in this chapter, the passibilist faces the strongest philosophical counterattack that the classical tradition can muster. If we survive this challenge, the case for qualified passibility will be all the stronger for having been tested. In Chapter 25, we will face the foreknowledge objection. In Chapter 26, we will look at the incarnation and the cross. And in Chapter 27, we will explore the Trinitarian dimensions of divine emotion. But first, we must deal with the "creepy emotions."

I want to be honest with you: this is one of the strongest objections to divine passibility, and it deserves a thorough and serious response. We cannot wave it away or pretend it is not a real problem. The objection cuts deep, and if we cannot answer it, the entire case for a passible God is in trouble. But I believe we can answer it — and answer it well — without giving up passibility. The key is to reject a simplistic view of divine empathy in favor of a more careful, nuanced understanding of what it means for God to share in the emotional experience of His creatures.

Let me state the chapter's thesis up front: the objection that divine passibility gives God "creepy emotions" — including things like sexual arousal, sadistic pleasure, irrational stupidity, and demented fury — can be fully answered by rejecting what Mullins calls "simplistic divine empathy" in favor of a more refined model. The passibilist does not need to claim that God feels exactly what every creature feels, or that God agrees with every creature's emotional evaluation of the world. A more careful account of divine empathy allows God to be genuinely responsive to His creatures without being morally corrupted, rationally compromised, or "creepy."¹

Stating the Problem Honestly

Throughout this book, we have argued that God is genuinely affected by His creatures. When His children suffer, He suffers with them. When sinners repent, He rejoices. When people rebel, He grieves. This is central to our case for passibility. But here is the uncomfortable follow-up question: if God genuinely shares in the emotional experience of His creatures, what about the ugly emotions?

Think about the full range of human emotional experience. Human beings feel compassion and joy and love — yes. But they also feel sexual arousal, sadistic pleasure, jealous rage, irrational fury, petty resentment, self-pity, shame, lust, and a host of other emotions that we would never want to attribute to God. If divine empathy means that God experiences what His creatures experience, does God feel what a man feels when he is sexually aroused? Does God experience the thrill that a torturer feels when inflicting pain? Does God share in the irrational fury of a person throwing a tantrum? Does God feel stupid when one of His creatures is confused?²

These are not silly questions. They are deadly serious. A God who experiences sexual arousal, sadistic pleasure, and stupidity is — to put it mildly — theologically problematic. Such a God would seem to violate His own moral perfection. He would seem irrational. And He would seem, well, creepy. An omnipresent, all-knowing being who experiences what every creature feels — including their most intimate, most shameful, most depraved emotions — raises troubling questions that the passibilist cannot afford to ignore.

The philosopher Richard Creel put this objection in memorably provocative terms. If God genuinely shares in all the feelings of His creatures, Creel asked, does that mean God feels horny?³ The question is deliberately shocking — and deliberately effective. Creel was not being flippant. He was making a serious philosophical point: the passibilist who claims that God empathizes with all creatures must reckon with the full implications of that claim.

Creel also pressed the objection in another direction. He argued that a God who genuinely shares in all creaturely emotions would have to rejoice with the sadist while the sadist tortures his victim, and grieve with the sadist when the victim dies and can no longer be tormented. As Creel argued, surely God is no more obligated than we are to share in the emotional reactions of a demented mind.⁴ That observation carries real force. A God who delights along with the torturer is a God who is morally monstrous.

This is the challenge we must answer in this chapter. And we begin by identifying the root of the problem: a simplistic and inadequate view of what divine empathy actually involves.

What Is Simplistic Divine Empathy?

R. T. Mullins does us a great service by identifying the precise view that generates the "creepy emotions" problem. He calls it "Simplistic Divine Empathy," and he defines it with two conditions:⁵

Simplistic Divine Empathy: (i) God feels exactly what His creatures feel, and (ii) God agrees with the emotional evaluation of His creatures.

Let me unpack these two conditions carefully, because everything in this chapter turns on understanding them — and then rejecting them.

Condition (i) says that God's empathy is a perfect mirror of creaturely experience. Whatever a creature feels, God feels the identical thing. If a human being feels a rush of sexual desire, God feels the same rush. If a person feels the thrill of cruelty, God feels the same thrill. If someone feels stupid, God feels stupid in exactly the same way. On this view, divine empathy is essentially a copy-and-paste operation: every conscious emotional state of every creature is duplicated in God's experience, exactly as the creature experiences it.

Condition (ii) says that God not only feels what creatures feel, but He shares their emotional judgments about the world. Recall from Chapter 2 that on the cognitive-evaluative theory of emotions, emotions are not just raw feelings. They involve evaluative judgments — assessments of the world as being a certain way. Anger involves the judgment that one has been wronged. Fear involves the judgment that something is dangerous. On condition (ii), when God empathizes with a creature, He shares not just the creature's feelings but the creature's evaluations. If the sadist judges that torture is delightful, God shares that judgment.⁶

Now, here is the critical point: Mullins argues — and I agree completely — that both conditions should be rejected. Neither one is required by passibility. Neither one is what careful passibilists actually believe. And when both conditions are rejected, the "creepy emotions" problem dissolves.

But we need to move carefully here, because an important question arises: if we reject both conditions, is there anything left of divine empathy? As Mullins notes, these two arguments — which he calls the Problem of Emotional Agreement and the Problem of Mere Feeling — appear to cause serious trouble for the passibilist precisely because they attack the two conditions that seem to make empathy what it is.⁷ If God does not feel what creatures feel and does not agree with their emotional evaluations, in what sense does God empathize at all?

That is the right question to ask. And in what follows, we will explore two sophisticated options that passibilists have developed to answer it.

Two Problems That Need Solving

Before we look at the solutions, let us make sure we understand the two problems clearly. Mullins distinguishes them with precision, and each attacks a different condition of the Simplistic Divine Empathy thesis.⁸

The Problem of Emotional Agreement

This problem targets condition (ii) — the claim that God agrees with the emotional evaluation of His creatures. Some creatures that God would empathize with are sadists. A sadist takes delight in inflicting pain. If God empathizes with the sadist and shares the sadist's emotional evaluation, then God judges that torturing the innocent is delightful. But a morally perfect God cannot make such a judgment. Such a judgment would violate what Mullins calls the "Moral Inconsistency Criterion."⁹ Therefore, the passibilist should reject condition (ii).

This problem is relatively straightforward to solve. The key insight is that empathy does not require agreement. You can understand how someone sees the world without sharing their evaluation. A good counselor can empathize deeply with an angry client without agreeing that the client's anger is justified. A wise parent can understand why a teenager feels that the rules are unfair without agreeing that the rules are actually unfair. Empathy, properly understood, preserves the empath's own perspective even while entering into the other person's perspective.¹⁰

The Problem of Mere Feeling

This problem is trickier. It targets condition (i) — the claim that God feels exactly what His creatures feel. Even if we solve the Problem of Emotional Agreement by saying God does not share the sadist's evaluation, there remains the question of whether God shares the sadist's feelings. Does God experience the physical-emotional sensation of sexual arousal? Does God feel the visceral thrill that accompanies cruelty?

This is where Creel's examples of feeling horny and feeling stupid come into play.¹¹ These examples do not necessarily require God to agree with any particular emotional evaluation. The claim is simply that God feels what the creature feels. But even without agreement, there seems to be something deeply troubling about a God who experiences sexual arousal or stupidity. As Mullins puts it, perhaps there is nothing immoral about God feeling horny as such, but it certainly appears to be creepy for God to be horny — so creepy that it verges on the immoral. And whatever one thinks of horniness, it is certainly irrational for God to feel stupid.¹²

So the Problem of Mere Feeling says: even if we reject condition (ii), the passibilist still has a problem with condition (i). If God feels exactly what His creatures feel, God feels some things that a perfect being should not feel. This problem is harder to solve, and different passibilists have proposed different solutions. Let us now look at the two major options.

Option 1: The Zagzebski Option — Omnisubjectivity

The first option comes from the philosopher Linda Zagzebski, who has developed one of the most sophisticated accounts of divine empathy in contemporary philosophy of religion. Zagzebski argues that God possesses a quality she calls "omnisubjectivity" — the property of consciously grasping with perfect accuracy and completeness the first-person perspective of every conscious being.¹³

To understand what omnisubjectivity means, we need to understand what empathy is. Empathy is often described loosely as "feeling what another person feels" or "putting yourself in someone else's shoes." But that loose description is actually ambiguous, and the ambiguity matters enormously for our purposes. There is a crucial difference between empathy and what psychologists call "emotional contagion." Emotional contagion is the unconscious absorption of another person's feelings — like when you walk into a room full of anxious people and start feeling anxious yourself without knowing why. You catch the emotion the way you might catch a cold. Empathy is something quite different. Empathy involves a conscious understanding of what another person is experiencing, while maintaining awareness that the other person's experience is not your own.¹⁴

This distinction is vital. When you empathize with a grieving friend, you do not lose your own identity and become your friend. You remain yourself. You retain your own perspective, your own knowledge, your own emotional equilibrium. But you also gain something — you come to understand, from the inside, what your friend's grief feels like. You "try on" their emotional shoes, as it were, without discarding your own shoes entirely.¹⁵

Why does this distinction matter so much for our topic? Because the "creepy emotions" objection tacitly assumes the emotional contagion model of divine empathy — as if God absorbs every creature's emotional state like a sponge absorbs water, without any filtering, evaluating, or processing. But that is not empathy. That is contagion. And no serious passibilist claims that God's emotional engagement with His creatures works like contagion. God is not a cosmic emotional sponge. He is a perfectly rational, perfectly wise, perfectly holy person who enters into the experience of His creatures with full cognitive awareness of what He is doing, why He is doing it, and how the creature's experience relates to His own perfect nature.

This distinction between empathy and contagion is not merely a philosophical technicality. It has profound pastoral implications. When the Bible says that God "bears our griefs and carries our sorrows" (Isaiah 53:4), it is describing a God who empathizes — a God who consciously, deliberately, and lovingly enters into our pain. It is not describing a God who is helplessly swept along by our emotional states like a leaf in a river. The God of the Bible is always the subject of His empathy, never its victim. He chooses to enter in. He chooses to feel with us. And His choice is always guided by His wisdom, shaped by His holiness, and motivated by His love.

Zagzebski argues that God must possess this kind of empathetic knowledge to a perfect degree — what she calls "perfect total empathy." This includes representing all of another person's conscious states: their beliefs, sensations, moods, desires, choices, and emotions.¹⁶ And God must have this perfect total empathy for all of His creatures. Why? Because Zagzebski holds that omnisubjectivity is entailed by God's omniscience. If God is all-knowing, He must possess not only propositional knowledge but also experiential knowledge. Knowing that someone is in pain is different from knowing what their pain feels like. A truly omniscient God must know both.¹⁷

Zagzebski also argues that omnisubjectivity is incompatible with impassibility. An impassible God is a being who is not moved by anything external, while an omnisubjective God is, by definition, moved to some extent by His creation. As Zagzebski explains, a copy of an emotion is an emotion. A perfect copy of pain is pain. If God perfectly grasps what it feels like for a creature to suffer, God is experiencing something that constitutes emotional disturbance — which means He cannot be in a state of undisturbed bliss.¹⁸ Omnisubjectivity and impassibility cannot coexist.

How Zagzebski Handles the Problem of Emotional Agreement

Zagzebski's solution to the Problem of Emotional Agreement is elegant. She points out that real empathy — as opposed to emotional contagion — never requires the empath to give up her own perspective. When you empathize with someone, you retain your own evaluative framework. You understand how the other person sees the world, but you do not necessarily agree with their assessment.¹⁹

Apply this to the sadist case. On Zagzebski's view, God will possess a perfect copy of the sadist's conscious states. God will understand from the inside what it is like for the sadist to delight in torturing the innocent. But God will not agree with the sadist that delight is the appropriate emotion to have in this situation. God's empathy gives Him understanding, not agreement. In fact, Zagzebski argues, it is precisely because God empathizes perfectly that He is able to accurately judge the sadist. Without understanding what motivates the sadist — without grasping the sadist's perspective from the inside — God would not be able to render a fully informed moral judgment. Far from being inconsistent with God's moral perfection, perfect empathy is actually required by it.²⁰

Think of it this way. A judge who sentences a criminal without understanding the criminal's motives, background, or inner life is a less thorough judge than one who takes all of that into account. Understanding does not mean approval. A therapist who deeply understands why a patient acts destructively does not thereby approve of the destruction. Similarly, God can perfectly understand the sadist's delight without sharing it — and His understanding actually makes His judgment more just, not less.

This is a powerful response. The passibilist does not need to claim that God agrees with every creature's emotional evaluation. Empathy involves understanding, not endorsement. God's empathy always comes paired with His own moral response — which in the case of the sadist will be wrath, not delight. Thus, the omnisubjective God can satisfy the Moral Inconsistency Criterion and avoid the Problem of Emotional Agreement.²¹

How Zagzebski Handles the Problem of Mere Feeling

The Problem of Mere Feeling is harder for Zagzebski's view. Even if God does not agree with the sadist's evaluation, the omnisubjective God still has a perfect grasp of the affects and sensations of every creaturely emotion. God knows what it is like for His creatures to feel sexual arousal. God knows what it is like for His creatures to experience hatred.²² And some people find this deeply troubling.

Zagzebski acknowledges this concern, but she finds it ultimately unpersuasive. She thinks the objection rests on the assumption that certain emotions are intrinsically immoral — that the mere experience of representing them, even without agreeing with them, is itself a form of moral contamination. On this view, God would be "contaminated by his own creatures" if He really grasped what it was like to have their most depraved feelings.²³

Zagzebski responds that this view is out of step with core Christian theological doctrines like grace, providence, and sanctification. The Christian God is not a deity who keeps His distance from the mess of creaturely existence. He is a God who enters into that mess. Zagzebski suggests that God's love is premised on God having a complete empathetic understanding of His creatures — and that sanctification itself may involve a breaking down of the barriers between human life and divine life, so that as human beings share in the divine life, God also shares in ours.²⁴

This is a suggestive response, but Zagzebski herself admits that it will not satisfy everyone. Some people remain convinced that there is something unseemly about an omnipresent being who has a perfect, first-person grasp of what it feels like to be sexually aroused or filled with hatred. And this discomfort is not unreasonable. So let us turn to a second option that takes this concern more seriously.

Option 2: The Maximal God Option

The second option takes a slightly different approach. Rather than claiming that God has total empathy, this view says that God has maximal empathy — the greatest degree of empathetic engagement that is consistent with His perfect moral nature. This is what Mullins calls "The Maximal God Option."²⁵

To understand this option, we need a brief detour into what theologians and philosophers call "perfect being theology." This is the tradition that goes back to Anselm of Canterbury's famous definition: God is the being than which nothing greater can be conceived.²⁶ In this framework, God possesses all "great-making properties" — qualities that it is better to have than not to have — to the greatest possible degree.

The philosopher Yujin Nagasawa has pointed out an important distinction within perfect being theology between two ways of understanding God's perfection.²⁷ One way is what Nagasawa calls the "Omni-God thesis" — the view that God possesses properties like omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence in an absolute, unlimited sense. The other way is what he calls the "Maximal God thesis" — the view that God possesses the maximally consistent set of power, knowledge, and goodness. The difference matters because some great-making properties might conflict with each other when pushed to their absolute limit. The Maximal God thesis says that God has the best possible combination of these properties — the greatest set that can all be held together without contradiction.²⁸

Here is the payoff for our topic. A passibilist who is uncomfortable with Zagzebski's full omnisubjectivity can say that God's empathy is maximal — the greatest degree of empathy that is consistent with God's moral and rational perfection. Where empathy would require God to experience something morally corrupt, irrational, or inconsistent with His nature, God's empathy reaches its limit. But where empathy involves sharing in the suffering, joy, grief, love, fear, or hope of His creatures, God empathizes fully.²⁹

Let me put this in the plainest possible terms. The Maximal God approach says that empathy is a great-making property — it is better for God to have empathy than not to have it. But like all great-making properties, empathy must be held in a way that is consistent with God's other perfections, especially His moral perfection and His perfect rationality. Omnipotence is a great-making property, but even omnipotence does not include the power to do what is logically impossible or morally evil (God cannot lie, cannot sin, cannot deny Himself). Similarly, empathy is a great-making property, but maximal empathy does not include the capacity to share in morally corrupt emotions. God's empathy is maximally great precisely because it is maximally consistent — it reaches the highest possible degree without contradicting any of His other perfections.

How the Maximal God Option Handles Creepy Emotions

The Maximal God option distinguishes between different kinds of creaturely emotions and applies different levels of empathetic engagement to each.

First, emotions that are morally good or morally neutral — grief, joy, love, fear, hope, compassion, longing, gratitude — are fully shared by God. There is nothing in these emotions that conflicts with God's moral perfection. In fact, many of them require divine empathy. A God who does not empathize with His children's suffering is deficient in love, not superior to it (as we argued in Chapter 22).

Second, emotions that are morally corrupt in their core evaluative judgment — sadistic pleasure, malicious delight, hateful gloating — are not shared by God at the level of agreement. God understands the evaluative judgment, but He does not adopt it as His own.

Third — and this is where the Maximal God option goes beyond Zagzebski — even at the level of mere feeling, God's grasp comes in varying degrees. The passibilist Keith Ward develops this point helpfully. Ward argues that all human experiences will affect the divine experience and cause God to feel either empathy or condemnation. But human experiences as such cannot be the actual experiences of God.³⁰

Consider an emotion like hopelessness. God can empathize with a creature who is feeling hopeless. God will feel the suffering of this creature. But it will not cause God to lose hope, because God also knows His own master plan for creation. God's empathetic knowledge is always associated with His own response — either condemnation or approval. And so there will be gradations in God's experiential knowledge and in the intensity of God's feelings. In the case of hopelessness, God has some grasp of the intensity of the affect, but it does not cause God to have the emotion of hopelessness Himself.³¹

Apply this to the creepy emotions. In the case of morally corrupt emotions like sadistic pleasure, the intensity of the affect for God will be quite low — and perhaps nonexistent. In the case of emotions like hopelessness or confusion, the intensity is higher, but not so high that God comes to experience hopelessness or confusion Himself. God's own knowledge, perspective, and moral character always frame and filter His empathetic engagement.³²

This, according to the Maximal God option, is what maximal empathy looks like. It is genuine, deep, and responsive — but it is shaped and bounded by God's perfect nature.

An Objection to the Maximal God Option

An important objection arises here. The classical theist might respond: if the passibilist is denying that God can have a perfect grasp of all conscious states, why not deny all such phenomenal knowledge of God? It seems like the passibilist is undermining the argument for omnisubjectivity in her attempt to preserve God's moral perfection. If the arguments for omnisubjectivity are undermined, then some of the arguments against impassibility are undermined too.³³

This objection moves too fast. The Maximal God thesis is not saying that God has no empathetic knowledge. It is saying that God has maximal empathetic knowledge — the greatest degree consistent with His moral and rational perfection. The claim is only that certain specific instances of empathy are inconsistent with moral perfection — not that empathy as a whole is incompatible with it.³⁴

As Mullins points out, passibilists like McConnell and Brasnett can still argue that a morally perfect God must empathize with our suffering. There is nothing in empathetic suffering that violates the dictates of morality. Thomas Aquinas himself argued that the virtuous person is disturbed by witnessing certain acts of horror.³⁵ The person who watches a child being abused and feels nothing is not morally superior — they are morally deficient. In the same way, a God who observes His children's suffering and feels nothing is not a greater God — He is a lesser one.

So the classical theist who wants to press the "creepy emotions" objection all the way to ruling out divine passibility faces a very tall order. She needs to show not just that certain instances of empathy are problematic, but that empathetic knowledge as a whole is inconsistent with moral perfection. The maximally empathetic God still has a vastly richer emotional life than the impassible God — and that is precisely what the passibilist needs.³⁶

Evaluating the Two Options

We have now looked at two ways for the passibilist to respond to the "creepy emotions" problem. The Zagzebski Option says God has perfect total empathy — omnisubjectivity. God grasps every creature's conscious experience from the inside. But God never loses His own perspective or agrees with immoral evaluations. The strength of this view is that it preserves the strongest possible link between divine empathy and divine omniscience. The weakness is that some people remain uncomfortable with the idea that God has a perfect first-person grasp of morally corrupt sensations.

The Maximal God Option says God has maximal empathy — the greatest degree consistent with His moral perfection. God's empathetic engagement with morally corrupt emotions comes in reduced degrees, and in some cases may be nonexistent. The strength is that it provides a more intuitive answer to the "creepiness" concern. The weakness is that it concedes some limitations on God's experiential knowledge.

Both views agree on the crucial points: God genuinely empathizes with His creatures. God does not agree with immoral emotional evaluations. God's emotional life is shaped by His moral perfection, not corrupted by His empathetic engagement. Both views are fully compatible with divine passibility. And both views decisively defeat the "creepy emotions" objection as an argument against passibility as such.

I find merit in both views, but I lean toward a position that combines elements of each. Let me now present what I believe is the strongest overall account of divine empathy.

The Author's Position: Morally Filtered Empathy

I believe the best way to understand divine empathy is what I will call "morally filtered empathy." This view can be stated in several propositions:

First, God genuinely enters into the emotional experience of His creatures. When His children suffer, He does not merely observe their suffering from the outside — He shares in it from the inside. He knows what grief feels like, what fear feels like, what heartbreak feels like, because He genuinely enters into these experiences with His creatures. This is the heart of divine empathy, and it is the foundation of God's compassion, love, and comfort. As we argued in Chapter 22, a God who cannot share in the experience of His creatures cannot truly love them.³⁷

Second, God's empathetic engagement is always mediated by His perfect moral character. God does not empathize with creatures in a raw, unfiltered way — like emotional contagion, where feelings are absorbed without any cognitive processing. Instead, God's empathy is always shaped by His perfect knowledge, wisdom, and moral holiness. He can understand the experience without being defined by it. He can share in the suffering without being overcome by it. He can grasp the perspective of the sinner without adopting the sinner's values.³⁸

Third, God empathizes with victims, not perpetrators. This is a point of enormous theological and pastoral importance, and I want to develop it carefully because I think it gets to the heart of the matter. When a torturer inflicts pain on a child, God's empathy is directed toward the child — not toward the torturer. God knows the child's fear, the child's pain, the child's confusion and helplessness. And that knowledge fuels His righteous anger toward the torturer. God does not need to share in the torturer's sadistic pleasure in order to judge the torturer justly. He needs only to understand it — and understanding is not the same as experiencing it from the inside.

Consider what happens when a compassionate bystander witnesses a violent crime. The bystander's empathy naturally flows toward the victim — toward the person being harmed. The bystander does not empathize with the attacker's aggression; the bystander empathizes with the victim's terror. This is how healthy empathy works. It is directional. It flows toward the vulnerable, the suffering, the wounded. Empathy with the perpetrator's pleasure would be a sign of moral dysfunction, not moral health. God's empathy works the same way — only perfectly. His heart goes out to the one who is suffering, and His wrath is directed toward the one who is causing the suffering.

Think about it this way. A judge in a courtroom can understand the motives of a murderer through testimony, evidence, psychological profiles, and careful reasoning. The judge does not need to feel the murderer's bloodlust in order to render a just verdict. In fact, a judge who did feel the murderer's bloodlust would be disqualified from serving — not because empathy is bad, but because certain emotional identifications are incompatible with the judicial role. Similarly, God can understand the inner life of the wicked without sharing their morally corrupt affections.³⁹

Fourth, God's own emotional responses always take priority. Even when God empathizes deeply with a creature's suffering, His own emotional life is not swallowed up by the creature's experience. God retains His own perspective, His own purposes, and His own emotional equilibrium. Consider the emotion of hopelessness. God can empathize with a creature who feels hopeless — He genuinely shares in the creature's suffering. But God does not Himself become hopeless, because He knows the end of the story. He knows that His plan will be fulfilled, that evil will be defeated, that every tear will be wiped away (Revelation 21:4). God's empathetic knowledge is always contextualized by His exhaustive knowledge of all things — past, present, and future. As we will discuss in Chapter 25, God's foreknowledge does not prevent Him from genuinely experiencing emotions, but it does provide a framework that keeps those emotions from overwhelming Him.⁴⁰

Fifth, the analogy of perfect parenting illuminates divine empathy. A perfectly wise and loving parent can understand their toddler's tantrum without sharing the toddler's irrational fury. The parent knows why the child is upset. The parent feels compassion for the child. The parent may even feel a measure of the child's frustration and distress. But the parent does not become irrational, throw herself on the floor, and start screaming alongside the toddler. The parent's maturity, wisdom, and love filter her empathetic engagement — allowing her to share in the child's experience without being reduced to it. She feels the child's pain without losing her own perspective. She enters into the child's world without abandoning her own.

God's empathy with His creatures works in an analogous way — though at an infinitely higher level. God enters into our experience with genuine emotional engagement, but His perfect nature ensures that He is never overwhelmed, never corrupted, never diminished by that engagement. He feels with us without losing Himself. He enters into our darkness without being swallowed by it. He shares our pain without being destroyed by it. And He does all of this not reluctantly, not grudgingly, but freely and joyfully — because entering into our experience is what love does. A love that keeps its distance is not really love. A love that enters in is the real thing.⁴¹

How This Position Answers the Specific "Creepy Emotions"

The "Horny God" Problem

Does God feel sexual arousal? No — not in the sense that Creel's objection requires. Sexual arousal is a bodily sensation tied to the physical hormonal and neurological systems of embodied creatures. God, who is spirit (John 4:24), does not have a body and therefore does not experience the physical sensations that accompany sexual arousal.

But here is the more important point: even if we set aside the question of embodiment, the morally filtered empathy model explains why God does not "feel horny" in any theologically troubling sense. God understands sexual desire — He created human beings as sexual creatures, after all, and He designed sexuality as a good gift within the covenant of marriage (Genesis 1:28; 2:24). God can understand the power and intensity of sexual desire without experiencing it as a personal emotional state.⁴² To put it simply: God is the designer of human sexuality, not a participant in it. He understands it perfectly — better than any creature — without experiencing it in the creaturely way.

The Sadist Problem

Does God feel the sadist's delight? No. Sadistic pleasure is a morally corrupt emotion — it is the perverse delight in causing suffering. God, who is perfectly holy and perfectly loving, does not experience delight at the suffering of innocent creatures. His moral nature categorically excludes this emotional state. As we argued in Chapter 18, God does experience hatred — but His hatred is directed at evil, injustice, and oppression, not at the innocent.⁴³

What God does experience in the presence of torture is something very different from the sadist's delight: He experiences grief for the victim and wrath toward the perpetrator. His empathy is directed to the one who is suffering, not to the one who is inflicting the suffering. God does not need to share the sadist's delight in order to judge the sadist — He only needs to understand what the sadist has done and why it is evil.

The Stupidity Problem

Does God feel stupid? Absolutely not. Stupidity — in the sense of confused, muddled, irrational thinking — is incompatible with omniscience. A God who knows all things cannot experience the cognitive state of not knowing or not understanding. Confusion is a privation — an absence of knowledge or clarity. It is not a positive emotional state that can be shared through empathy; it is a limitation that God, by His nature, does not possess.⁴⁴

Can God empathize with a creature who is confused? Yes — in the sense that He understands what confusion feels like for the creature, and He feels compassion for the creature's limited perspective. But He does not Himself become confused. A parent can understand that a child is confused by a math problem and feel compassion for the child's frustration without becoming confused by the math problem herself.

The Hateful Rage Problem

Does God share in a creature's hateful, vindictive rage? No. As we argued in Chapter 16, God's anger is always righteous, measured, patient, and purposeful. It is never the irrational, out-of-control fury that characterizes so much human anger. God can understand why a creature feels hateful rage — He knows the wounds, the injustice, the brokenness that fuel it. But He does not experience hate-filled vindictiveness Himself, because such an emotion is morally inconsistent with His loving, patient, and just character.

God's own anger at evil is a very different thing from human vindictive rage. God's wrath is a holy response to genuine injustice, aimed at setting things right. Human vindictive rage is often petty, self-centered, and destructive. God empathizes with the pain behind the rage without sharing the rage itself.

Why This Problem Is Far Worse for Process Theology

Before moving on, I want to make an important observation. The "creepy emotions" problem is far more devastating for process theology than for the mediating position I am defending in this book.

As we discussed in Chapter 5, process theology (associated with Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne) holds that the world is God's body and that God is the "fellow-sufferer who understands." Process theology affirms an unqualified, unrestricted passibility: God feels everything that every creature feels, and the world's experience literally constitutes part of God's experience. On this view, there is no principled way to exclude inappropriate emotions from God's experience. The process theologian has no mechanism for filtering or limiting divine empathy, because the entire framework is built on the premise that God's experience is constituted by the world's experience.⁴⁵

This is one of the many reasons I reject process theology. But the mediating position I am defending has a clear and principled mechanism for filtering divine empathy: God's perfect moral character. On my view, God is not constituted by the world's experience. He is a self-sufficient, sovereign being who freely chooses to be affected by His creatures out of love. His empathetic engagement is always shaped and bounded by His perfect nature.

The "creepy emotions" objection, then, is not really an argument against passibility as such. It is an argument against simplistic, unqualified passibility — the kind of passibility that process theology offers. The qualified, morally grounded passibility that I am defending handles the objection without difficulty.⁴⁶

The Biblical Foundation for Morally Filtered Empathy

The view I am defending is not merely a philosophical construction. It is deeply rooted in the biblical portrayal of God's emotional engagement with His creatures. Throughout Scripture, we see a God who empathizes with His people's suffering, understands their experience from the inside, and yet is never morally compromised by that empathetic engagement.

Consider Hebrews 4:15, one of the most important verses for the theology of divine empathy: "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin." Notice the two-part structure. The first part affirms empathy: Jesus sympathizes with our weaknesses. The second part affirms moral perfection: He was tempted "yet without sin." Jesus entered into the full range of human experience — including temptation — without being morally corrupted by it. This is exactly the kind of morally filtered empathy I am describing.⁴⁷

Consider also Isaiah 53:3–4, the great Suffering Servant passage: "He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. . . . Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows." The Servant enters into the full depth of human suffering. He bears our griefs. He carries our sorrows. And yet this same Servant is described as righteous (Isaiah 53:11), without violence or deceit (Isaiah 53:9). His empathetic suffering does not compromise His moral perfection.

Or consider Exodus 3:7–8, where God says to Moses: "I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them." God sees, hears, knows, and comes down. This is the language of empathetic engagement. But notice what God does not do: He does not empathize with the Egyptian taskmasters. His empathy is directed toward the victims, not the oppressors.⁴⁸

This biblical pattern — empathy directed toward the suffering, moral clarity directed toward the oppressor, and decisive action flowing from both — is exactly what we would expect from a God who empathizes through a moral filter.

The prophet Hosea gives us perhaps the most emotionally intense portrayal of divine empathy in the entire Old Testament. In Hosea 11:8, God cries out: "How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? . . . My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender." God empathizes with Israel's suffering — even though that suffering is largely self-inflicted — and His compassion overwhelms His judgment. But God does not empathize with the sin that caused the suffering. He empathizes with their pain while condemning their rebellion. His empathy is real, deep, and costly — but it is morally filtered.⁴⁹

The Incarnation as the Supreme Model of Filtered Empathy

The incarnation of the Son of God provides the ultimate model of morally filtered empathy. When the eternal Son took on human nature, He entered into the full range of human experience — including suffering, temptation, grief, and death. He experienced what it is like to be hungry, tired, lonely, afraid, and in pain. He was "made like his brothers in every respect" (Hebrews 2:17) so that He could be a merciful and faithful high priest.

And yet Jesus' empathetic engagement with human experience never compromised His moral perfection. He was "tempted as we are, yet without sin" (Hebrews 4:15). He entered into the darkness of the human condition without being consumed by it. He experienced the full force of temptation without yielding to it. He bore the weight of human sin on the cross without becoming sinful.⁵⁰

This is the pattern for understanding divine empathy more broadly. Just as the incarnate Son entered into human experience without being morally corrupted by it, so the triune God enters into the emotional experience of His creatures without being morally corrupted by it. The incarnation demonstrates that it is possible for a divine person to share deeply in creaturely experience while remaining perfectly holy. The "creepy emotions" objection assumes that empathy inevitably involves moral corruption — but the incarnation proves otherwise.

I find it significant that the author of Hebrews links the incarnation directly to divine empathy. The reason Jesus became human, Hebrews tells us, is precisely so that He could empathize with our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15) and help those who are being tempted (Hebrews 2:18). The incarnation was an act of empathetic solidarity — God entering into our condition so that He could understand it from the inside and offer genuine comfort and help. If this is possible for the incarnate Son, it is surely possible for the triune God to empathize with His creatures without moral compromise.⁵¹

Connecting to the Broader Argument

Let me step back and connect this chapter to the broader argument of the book. In Chapters 22 and 23, we showed that strict impassibility faces devastating internal contradictions. The unity problem showed that a God who cannot be moved by His creatures cannot truly love them — because love, by its very nature, involves being affected by the beloved's condition. The wrath argument showed that a God who literally has wrath but denies creaturely influence is caught in an impossible logical bind — if wrath requires an object, and the object is sinful creatures, then God is causally influenced by creatures, and impassibility collapses. Those arguments establish that some form of passibility is necessary.

But the "creepy emotions" objection was the impassibilist's best remaining card. The impassibilist could say: "Fine, passibility avoids the problems you identified — but it creates a new and equally devastating problem. A passible God has creepy, morally inappropriate emotions. So impassibility is still the safer option, even with its difficulties."

This chapter has shown that this final card is a weak one. The "creepy emotions" problem arises only from a simplistic, unqualified view of divine empathy — a view that no careful passibilist holds. Once we adopt a more nuanced model, the creepy emotions disappear. And here is the crucial point: the passibilist's solution to the "creepy emotions" problem is far less costly than the impassibilist's solution to the unity problem or the wrath argument. The passibilist merely needs to qualify divine empathy — saying that God empathizes in ways consistent with His moral perfection, rather than in an unfiltered, unlimited way. The impassibilist, by contrast, has to deny that God truly loves, or deny that God truly has wrath, or deny that wrath has any connection to creaturely behavior — and each of those denials comes at an enormous theological price.

As Roberto Sirvent has argued in his important work on emotional vulnerability, the real problem is not that God empathizes too much but that the impassibilist God empathizes too little. A God who is completely unaffected by the suffering of His creatures is not morally superior — He is morally deficient. Emotional vulnerability is not a weakness to be overcome but a perfection to be celebrated.⁵² As we will argue more fully in Chapter 31, if God is the supreme moral exemplar, and if imitating God means imitating His emotional engagement, then emotional vulnerability must be a divine perfection — not a divine deficiency.

The "creepy emotions" objection, then, far from undermining passibility, actually reinforces a key insight: divine passibility must be qualified. God is not passible in the simplistic, unfiltered sense that process theology suggests. He is passible in the way that the Bible describes: genuinely responsive, genuinely affected, genuinely empathetic — but always sovereign, always holy, always in control. His emotions are never inappropriate, never irrational, never morally corrupt. They are always perfectly fitting, always morally perfect, always an expression of His holy love.

This is precisely the mediating position I am defending in this book. God is genuinely passible — He truly feels. But He is not passible in a way that compromises His nature. His emotional life is a perfection, not a deficiency. And His empathy, far from producing creepy emotions, produces the most beautiful and comforting reality in all of theology: a God who genuinely understands us, who genuinely enters into our experience, and who genuinely feels our pain — all while remaining the sovereign, holy, loving Lord of all creation.

Lister's Framework and the Mediating Position

Rob Lister's helpful framework of "impassible and impassioned" is especially relevant here. Lister argues that God is impassible in the sense that His essential nature, character, and purposes cannot be overcome or destabilized by anything — but He is genuinely impassioned, meaning He has real, responsive emotional engagement with His creatures.⁵³ This framework maps directly onto the question of divine empathy. God is "impassible" in the sense that His empathetic engagement never overwhelms, corrupts, or destabilizes His nature. He does not lose Himself in creaturely experience. He is not dragged down to the level of the creature's moral corruption. But He is "impassioned" in the sense that He genuinely enters into the emotional experience of His creatures — sharing their grief, rejoicing in their joy, and being moved by their cries.

Lister's framework helps us see that the "creepy emotions" problem is actually a problem for unqualified passibility — the view that God is passible without any filtering, limits, or safeguards. But it is not a problem for qualified passibility — the view that God is genuinely responsive but always in a way that is consistent with His perfect nature. The distinction between "impassible" (in the qualified sense of not being overwhelmed) and "impassioned" (in the sense of genuine emotional engagement) gives us exactly the conceptual tools we need to answer the "creepy emotions" objection while maintaining a robust doctrine of divine empathy.⁵⁴

I lean more strongly toward passibility than Lister does — I think Lister sometimes concedes too much to the impassibilist tradition. But on this particular issue, I think Lister's instinct is exactly right: the answer to the "creepy emotions" problem is not to abandon divine empathy but to qualify it. God's empathy is real, but it is empathy exercised by a perfect being — and perfection shapes, filters, and directs that empathy in ways that prevent it from ever becoming morally inappropriate.

Empathy, Knowledge, and the Limits of Understanding

One more issue deserves attention before we conclude. Some readers might wonder whether the morally filtered empathy model limits God's knowledge. If God does not experience sadistic pleasure from the inside, does God fully understand sadistic pleasure? Is there a gap in God's knowledge?

I do not think so, for several reasons. First, as we discussed in Chapters 2 and 4, there are different kinds of knowledge. Propositional knowledge and experiential knowledge are distinct. God's propositional knowledge is exhaustive and unlimited — He knows every fact about every creature's emotional experience. This propositional knowledge gives God a complete and perfect understanding of sadistic pleasure, even if He does not experience it from the inside.⁵⁵

An analogy may help. A brilliant psychiatrist who specializes in psychopathy can understand the minds of serial killers with extraordinary depth and precision — without ever sharing their homicidal desires. In the same way, God can have a complete, exhaustive, and perfectly accurate understanding of morally corrupt emotions without experiencing them as His own.

Second, God's unique perspective as the Creator gives Him a kind of understanding of creaturely experience that goes beyond anything a creature could possess. The designer of an engine understands the engine better than the engine understands itself — even if the designer has never been an engine. God created the neurological systems that produce sexual arousal. He designed the psychological capacities that can be twisted into sadistic pleasure. He does not need to be a sadist to understand sadism.

Third, the concession is quite small. The Maximal God option does not deny that God has experiential knowledge of a vast range of creaturely emotions. God does experientially know what grief feels like, what fear feels like, what love feels like, what joy feels like, what righteous anger feels like. The only category excluded is morally corrupt emotions — a tiny fraction of the total emotional landscape.

Fourth, the impassibilist is in a far worse position on this issue. The impassibilist claims that God has no experiential knowledge of creaturely emotion — not just morally corrupt emotions, but all creaturely emotions. The maximal empathy model gives God vastly more knowledge than the impassibility model does. If the critic is worried about gaps in God's knowledge, she should be far more worried about the impassibilist's position.

Conclusion: A God Who Understands Without Being Corrupted

We have traveled a long road in this chapter, but the destination is worth the journey. The "creepy emotions" objection — the claim that divine passibility saddles God with morally inappropriate emotions like sexual arousal, sadistic pleasure, and stupidity — is one of the most provocative challenges to the passibilist position. We took it seriously, as it deserves.

But we have shown that the objection fails. It rests on a simplistic and inadequate view of divine empathy — the view that God feels exactly what every creature feels and agrees with every creature's emotional evaluation. No careful passibilist holds this view. Once we replace it with a more nuanced model — whether Zagzebski's omnisubjectivity, the Maximal God option, or the morally filtered empathy model I have proposed — the creepy consequences disappear.

Let me summarize the key moves we have made. First, we identified the root of the problem: Simplistic Divine Empathy, with its two conditions of exact feeling replication and emotional agreement. Second, we showed that the Problem of Emotional Agreement is solved by recognizing that empathy never requires the empath to surrender her own evaluative perspective. God can understand the sadist's delight without sharing it, just as a judge can understand a criminal's motives without endorsing them. Third, we showed that the Problem of Mere Feeling can be solved either by Zagzebski's appeal to the distinction between empathetic understanding and emotional contagion, or by the Maximal God thesis's appeal to gradations in empathetic engagement. Fourth, we developed the concept of morally filtered empathy — the view that God's empathetic engagement is always shaped, bounded, and directed by His perfect moral character. Fifth, we grounded this view in the biblical evidence, showing that the God of Scripture consistently empathizes with victims while directing moral clarity and righteous anger toward perpetrators. Sixth, we showed that the incarnation provides the supreme model of filtered empathy — Jesus entered into the full range of human experience, including temptation, without being morally corrupted by it.

The passibilist can affirm, with full confidence, that God genuinely empathizes with His creatures. He shares their grief, their joy, their fear, their love. He knows what it is like to suffer, because He has entered into suffering with His people. He knows what it is like to rejoice, because He delights in the flourishing of His children. But He does not share in morally corrupt emotions, because His perfect moral character filters and shapes His empathetic engagement. He understands evil without participating in it. He knows the hearts of sinners without sharing their depravity.

And far from being a weakness, this morally filtered empathy is actually the strongest and most beautiful form of empathy imaginable. It is the empathy of a God who loves perfectly, who understands completely, and who enters into our experience without ever losing His own perfect holiness. It is the empathy described in Hebrews 4:15 — a high priest who sympathizes with our weaknesses, who has been tested in every respect as we are, yet without sin.

That is the God we worship. Not a God who is too distant to understand our pain. Not a God whose empathy makes Him morally questionable. But a God who enters into the full depth of human experience — including its darkest moments — and yet remains perfectly holy, perfectly wise, and perfectly loving. A God whose empathy is a perfection, not a deficiency. A God whose heart goes out to His creatures without ever losing its moral center.

I began this chapter by saying that the "creepy emotions" objection is one of the strongest challenges to divine passibility. I still think that is true — it is a serious objection that deserves a serious response. But I also believe that we have provided that response. The passibilist has nothing to fear from this objection. God can be genuinely empathetic without being creepy, genuinely responsive without being morally compromised, and genuinely affected by His creatures without being dragged down to their level. That is what it means for God to be both passible and perfect. That is what it means for God to love like God.

In the next chapter, we will turn to another important philosophical challenge: the objection that God's exhaustive foreknowledge makes genuine emotional responses impossible. If God already knows everything that will happen, can He genuinely grieve "when" it happens? We will argue — drawing on the parent analogy and the distinction between propositional and experiential knowledge — that foreknowledge and genuine emotion are fully compatible.⁵⁶