Part V: Philosophical and Systematic Challenges

Chapter 26

The Cross, the Incarnation, and the Suffering of God

Introduction: The Heart of It All

We have now arrived at the center of everything. All the arguments we have traced — biblical, historical, philosophical — come together at a single point in time and space: a wooden cross on a hill outside Jerusalem, where a man named Jesus hung dying. The cross of Christ is the center of the Christian faith. It is the place where God's love and God's justice meet. It is the event that defines everything we believe about who God is and what He is like. And it is, I believe, the ultimate proof that God genuinely feels.

Here is why this matters so much for the question we have been exploring throughout this book. If God truly suffered at the cross — if the agony of Calvary touched not just a human body but the very heart of God — then the case for divine impassibility collapses at the most important moment in all of history. On the other hand, if only the human nature of Jesus suffered while God the Son remained in a state of undisturbed bliss in His divine nature — if the Father watched His Son die without feeling a shred of anguish — then we must ask a deeply troubling question: Does God really care?¹

The stakes could not be higher. How we answer the question of divine suffering at the cross shapes how we understand God's love, the meaning of the atonement, the nature of the Trinity, and our own experience of suffering. If the cross reveals the heart of God — and I believe it does — then what it reveals is a God who is passionately, painfully, gloriously involved with His creatures. A God who enters into the darkest human suffering and bears it in His own being. A God who loves so deeply that He would rather die than let us go.

In this chapter, we will explore what the incarnation and the cross reveal about God's emotional life. We will examine the Chalcedonian framework of two natures in one person and ask whether it really allows us to partition Christ's suffering neatly between His human and divine natures. We will consider what the Father experienced at the cross — and why the answer is not patripassianism. We will engage with Jürgen Moltmann's powerful but problematic theology of the crucified God. And we will present Graham Cole's helpful framework of "essential impassibility and affect passibility" as a way forward. Throughout, I will argue that the cross did not make God passible — it revealed that He always was.²

What the Incarnation Reveals About God's Emotional Life

Before we can understand what happened at the cross, we need to understand what happened at the incarnation. When the eternal Son of God took on human flesh and was born as a baby in Bethlehem, something staggering occurred. God entered into human experience. Not as a visitor watching from the outside, but as a genuine participant living from the inside. The incarnation means that God knows what it is like to be human — to hunger, to thirst, to grow weary, to feel joy, to grieve, to be afraid, to love, to suffer, and to die.

This is what Jesus meant when He told Philip, "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9, ESV). Jesus is not merely a messenger from God. He is not just a prophet who speaks God's words. He is the visible image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15). When we look at Jesus, we are looking at God. When we see Jesus weep at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:35), we are seeing what God is like. When we see Jesus burn with righteous anger in the temple (John 2:13–17), we are seeing what God is like. When we see Jesus overwhelmed with compassion for the crowds (Matthew 9:36), we are seeing what God is like.³

As we explored in detail in Chapter 20, the emotional life of Jesus is rich, varied, and deeply human. He experienced compassion (Mark 1:41), grief (Mark 3:5), anger (Mark 11:15–17), distress (Mark 14:33–34), joy (Luke 10:21), and love (Mark 10:21; John 13:1). If Jesus truly reveals the Father — and the Christian faith stands or falls on this claim — then the Father, too, is a being of deep emotional engagement.⁴

But we must be careful here. The incarnation does not mean that God was always emotional only because He became human. Rather, the incarnation reveals what was always true about God. God did not become compassionate at the incarnation — He has always been compassionate. God did not learn to grieve when Jesus wept — He has always grieved over the brokenness of His world. The incarnation did not change God's character. It displayed God's character in a form that human beings could see, touch, and know. As Jung Young Lee observed, the incarnation was not the beginning of divine passibility but a continuation and intensification of it in time and space.⁵

This is a crucial point for our argument. The classical impassibilist tradition has generally maintained that whatever suffering occurred at the cross was limited to the human nature of Christ. The divine nature, they argue, remained untouched, undisturbed, and impassible throughout. But if the incarnation is a revelation of God's eternal character — if Jesus shows us what God has always been like — then the emotions of Jesus are not merely human additions to an otherwise unemotional deity. They are windows into the heart of God Himself.⁶ For a more detailed treatment of how the incarnation relates to the emotional life of God, I would refer the reader to the author's companion work, The Incarnation and the Soul: Why Physicalism Fails the Christ of the Creeds, which develops the full Christological argument at length.

Consider for a moment what it would mean if the incarnation told us nothing about God's emotional life. On the strict impassibilist reading, Jesus' weeping at Lazarus' tomb (John 11:35) would tell us something about human nature but nothing about divine nature. His compassion for the crowds would be a purely human response — moving and beautiful, perhaps, but not a window into God's own heart. His anguish in Gethsemane would be the distress of a human being facing death, with no counterpart in the divine being who watched from a state of eternal serenity. In short, the incarnation would reveal what it is like to be a perfect human being, but it would tell us almost nothing about what it is like to be God.

I find this deeply problematic — both theologically and pastorally. Theologically, it drives a wedge between Jesus and the Father that undermines the very purpose of the incarnation. If Jesus' emotional life does not reveal the Father's emotional life, then in what sense does Jesus truly reveal the Father? We can say that Jesus reveals the Father's holiness, His justice, His power — but not His heart? That seems arbitrary at best and incoherent at worst. Pastorally, it robs us of one of the deepest comforts of the Christian faith. When we come to God in our grief, we want to know that He understands — not merely in the abstract sense that He knows all propositions about grief, but in the intimate, experiential sense that He has been there. The incarnation is supposed to give us that assurance. But if Christ's emotions are sealed off from His divine nature, then even the incarnation leaves us with a God who observes our pain from a safe emotional distance.

Alan Richardson helpfully unpacks the significance of the incarnation for our understanding of God's character. He argues that if Jesus is merely human and not in any sense God, then we cannot believe that God was so loving as to take action by way of incarnation on our behalf. If Jesus is not in any sense God, it becomes proportionately harder for us to believe in the existence of a God of love at all. The doctrine of the incarnation is essential, Richardson contends, for our belief in a God of love.⁶⁰ This is precisely right. The incarnation is not merely a rescue mission — it is a revelation. It reveals the very heart of God. And what it reveals is a heart that beats with compassion, aches with grief, burns with righteous anger, and overflows with love.

The Chalcedonian Framework: Two Natures, One Person

In AD 451, the Council of Chalcedon issued one of the most important statements in all of Christian theology. It declared that Jesus Christ exists in two natures — fully divine and fully human — united in one person, "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation." This means that Christ's divine nature is not mixed with His human nature (they remain distinct), but they are also not separated (they belong to one person). The person of Jesus Christ is one — He is a single individual, a single "who" — even though He has two natures, two sets of attributes, two "whats."⁷

For the impassibility debate, Chalcedon has traditionally been read to support a key conclusion: only the human nature suffered at the cross, while the divine nature remained impassible. Thomas Weinandy, one of the most sophisticated contemporary defenders of this position, argues that the weighty tradition behind divine impassibility should not be dismissed. For Weinandy, the Son of God suffered and died, but He did so only through His human nature. The divine nature was the unchanging foundation upon which the human suffering was experienced, but it was not itself affected by that suffering.⁸

This reading of Chalcedon relies on an important theological tool called the communicatio idiomatum (koh-moo-nih-KAH-tee-oh ih-dee-oh-MAH-toom), which is Latin for "communication of properties." This is the idea that because the two natures are united in one person, what is true of either nature can be said of the person. So we can rightly say, "God died on the cross" — because the person who died is a divine person. But on the classical reading, this does not mean that the divine nature died. It means that the divine person experienced death through His human nature.⁹

Now, there is something right about this framework. Chalcedon is a guardrail that protects us from serious errors on both sides. On one side, it prevents us from saying that the divine nature was transformed into a human nature (monophysitism). On the other, it prevents us from splitting Christ into two persons — a divine Christ who watches from above and a human Christ who suffers below (Nestorianism). The person who suffered on the cross is one person — and that person is God the Son.

But here is where I believe the classical reading goes wrong — or at least, does not go far enough. The classical tradition says that natures suffer. The human nature suffered; the divine nature did not. But I would argue that this gets things backward. Natures do not suffer. Persons do.¹⁰

This distinction matters enormously. If persons are the subjects of experience, and the person of Christ is a divine person, then it follows that God the Son genuinely experienced the suffering of the cross. The human nature provided the capacity for that suffering (God, apart from the incarnation, does not have a body that can be crucified). But the one who suffered — the "I" who cried out in agony — was the eternal Son of God.¹¹

This is not Apollinarianism — the ancient heresy that denied Christ had a human soul. I fully affirm that Christ had a complete human nature, including a human mind, human emotions, and a human soul. The point is not that Christ's humanity was incomplete but that the person who possessed that humanity was divine. And a person's experience cannot be neatly partitioned between "natures" as if those natures were separate containers. When you feel pain, it is the whole you that hurts — not just your body while your mind remains in bliss.

Rob Lister makes a helpful observation on this point. He notes that the Reformed tradition's understanding of the communicatio idiomatum (what theologians call the in concreto version) holds that the attributes of both natures are communicated to the person of Christ, not to each other. So the human property of suffering is experienced by the person of the Son — without being communicated to the divine nature itself. This preserves the integrity of both natures while recognizing that the person who suffered is divine.¹²

It is worth noting that even Martin Luther — who is not typically associated with the passibility movement — pushed the boundaries of the communicatio idiomatum further than most of his contemporaries. Luther at times extended the doctrine to suggest not merely the communication of attributes from the two natures to the person, but something approaching an exchange of properties between the natures themselves. As Dennis Ngien has observed, for Luther, the assertion of God's suffering can only be made in concreto — in the concrete person of Jesus, the God-man. Though God considered in the abstract (in abstracto) does not suffer, God in His sovereign freedom determined Himself in His Word and therefore became passible in Jesus Christ out of His unfathomable love toward sinners.⁶¹

Luther's instinct here is profoundly right, even if his formulation sometimes outpaced the theological categories available to him. He saw clearly that a theology of the cross (theologia crucis) — his great contribution to Christian thought — requires that the cross touch God in some genuine way. If the cross is merely something that happened to a human nature while the divine person remained untouched in His divine nature, then the cross reveals nothing about God except that He is clever enough to engineer a rescue plan. But Luther knew that the cross reveals far more than that. It reveals the heart of a God who loves so deeply that He enters into the very experience of death — not as a detached observer but as a genuine participant.

The passibilist argument from the cross, as Weinandy himself summarizes it, operates on three interconnected levels. First, because God has always suffered with those He loved, He sent His Son into the world. The cross thus expresses fully God's eternal divine nature and is the paradigm of a suffering God. Second, if the Son of God actually became man, then His suffering must have, in some sense, touched His divinity as well — a person's suffering cannot be neatly divided between "natures." Third, the Son's cry of dereliction on the cross was not merely experienced as man but touched the very depths of the relationship between Father and Son.⁶² Weinandy, of course, disagrees with all three points. But I find the logic compelling — especially the second point about the indivisibility of personal experience.

At the same time, Lister argues for what he calls the extra Calvinisticum — the principle, going back well before Calvin, that the Word (Logos) is fully united to but never totally contained within the human nature. This means that even during the crucifixion, the Son of God continued to sustain the universe by His divine power. The ontological fabric of the Trinity was not torn apart at the cross. The eternal relationship between Father and Son was not destroyed. The atonement was a forensic sacrifice — a judicial act — not an ontological rupture in God's being.¹³

This is an important guardrail, and I agree with it. But — and this is my key point — the fact that the Trinity was not ontologically ruptured does not mean that no one suffered. A parent who watches a child undergo surgery is not ontologically changed by the experience. But the parent genuinely suffers. The relationship is not destroyed. But the parent's heart is broken. In the same way, the cross did not destroy the eternal bond between Father and Son. But it was an event of genuine, excruciating suffering for the divine persons involved.

The Second Council of Constantinople and Theopaschitism

Before we go further, it is worth pausing to consider an important historical development. In AD 553, the Second Council of Constantinople issued its tenth anathema, which declared: "If anyone does not confess that our Lord Jesus Christ who was crucified in the flesh is true God and the Lord of Glory and one of the Holy Trinity: let him be anathema."¹⁴

This statement is what theologians call "theopaschitism" (thee-oh-PAS-kih-tiz-um) — from the Greek theos (God) and paschein (to suffer). It is the affirmation that God suffered in the flesh. Now, in its earlier history, theopaschitism had sometimes been associated with monophysitism (the heresy that Christ had only one nature). But by the time of Constantinople II, the formula had been carefully distinguished from that error. What the council affirmed was simply this: the person who was crucified is a divine person. God the Son suffered. This is an undisputed fact of orthodox Christology.¹⁵

As Lister carefully explains, theopaschitism in its mature formulation did not make any specific claim about how or whether Christ's divine nature was implicated in His incarnate sufferings. It simply pointed out the christological fact that the one who suffered is truly God. But even this modest affirmation has significant implications for the impassibility debate. If the divine person of the Son suffered — and the council says He did — then at the very least, we cannot say that God was entirely unaffected by the cross.¹⁶

It is also important to distinguish theopaschitism from patripassianism — the heresy that the Father suffered on the cross. Patripassianism arose from modalism (the belief that Father, Son, and Spirit are not distinct persons but merely different "modes" or roles of one God). If the Father and the Son are not really distinct, then when the Son suffers, the Father suffers in exactly the same way. This is what the early church rightly condemned.¹⁷

But — and this is a crucial distinction — one can affirm that the Father suffered at the cross without being a patripassian. Patripassianism says the Father suffered on the cross because He and the Son are the same person. What I am arguing is something quite different: the Father suffered at the cross — as a father who watches his beloved son die in agony. The Father was not crucified. But the Father grieved. These are very different claims, and it is important not to confuse them.¹⁸

The Father's Experience at the Cross

What did God the Father experience when His Son hung dying on the cross?

The classical impassibilist answer is: nothing. Or more precisely: God the Father experienced no change of emotional state. His eternal, undisturbed blessedness continued without interruption. He observed the crucifixion — which He had decreed from all eternity — with the same serene equanimity with which He observes all events in history. The cross was part of His plan. His plan was perfect. And He was perfectly happy with it.

I find this answer deeply unsatisfying — not because it is logically impossible, but because it is morally monstrous. What kind of father watches his son die in unspeakable agony and feels nothing? Every parent who has lost a child knows that the deepest grief a human being can experience is the death of their child. And Scripture repeatedly uses the language of fatherhood to describe God's relationship with the Son. At Jesus' baptism, the Father's voice thundered from heaven: "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased" (Matthew 3:17, ESV). If the Father truly loved the Son — and the entire Christian faith depends on this being true — then the Father's heart was involved at the cross.¹⁹

Thomas Weinandy, to his credit, recognizes this tension. He acknowledges that we must predicate grief and sorrow of the Father in connection with the Son's suffering. But he insists that these emotions are "metaphorical" — they do not imply that the Father underwent emotional changes of state or suffered any form of divine mental distress comparable to what human beings experience. Yet, Weinandy adds, what is expressed within these metaphors is "nonetheless absolutely true."²⁰

I appreciate Weinandy's honesty here, but I think his position is unstable. If the Father's grief is "absolutely true" — if it points to something genuinely real in God's experience — then in what sense is it merely "metaphorical"? A metaphor that is "absolutely true" is not really a metaphor at all. It is an analogical description of something real. And if the Father's grief is real, then the Father is passible — at least in the sense that He genuinely experiences emotional responses to what happens in history.²¹

My position — and I want to state it as clearly as I can — is not patripassianism. The Father was not on the cross. The Father did not experience the physical agony of crucifixion. The Father did not die. The Father's suffering was distinct from the Son's suffering, just as a parent's grief at a child's death is distinct from the child's suffering in dying. But the Father's suffering was real. When the Son cried out in anguish, the Father's heart broke. When the Son bore the weight of the world's sin, the Father felt the unbearable pain of watching His beloved child endure what no parent should ever have to witness.²²

Karl Barth, himself notoriously difficult to categorize on the passibility spectrum, nevertheless offered a powerful observation about the Father's involvement at the cross. He wrote that it is not at all the case that God has no part in the suffering of Jesus Christ even in His mode of being as the Father. Primarily, Barth argued, it is God the Father who suffers in the offering and sending of His Son in His abasement. This fatherly fellow-suffering of God is the mystery, the basis, of the humiliation of His Son — the truth of that which takes place historically in His crucifixion.⁶³

Barth's language here is striking. He speaks of the Father's "fellow-suffering" — not patripassianism (the Father being crucified), but genuine co-suffering (the Father sharing in the anguish of the Son's ordeal). This is precisely the kind of distinction that the impassibility debate needs. The Father and the Son suffer — but they suffer differently. The Son suffers as the one who bears the sin. The Father suffers as the one who watches, who sends, who delivers up His beloved to the horror of the cross. As Moltmann observed, the "Fatherlessness of the Son" is matched by the "Sonlessness of the Father." Both are genuine experiences of loss, of anguish, of heartbreak. But they are not the same experience. The distinction of persons is maintained even in the unity of suffering.

We should also consider the significance of the Gethsemane narrative for understanding the Father's experience. In the garden, Jesus prayed: "Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will" (Mark 14:36, ESV). The intimacy of the address — "Abba," the Aramaic term of familial closeness — reveals the depth of the relationship at stake. Jesus was not praying to an abstract deity. He was praying to His Father. And the Father's answer — silence, the cup not removed — must have cost the Father something. What kind of father hears his child beg to be spared from torture and says nothing? Only a father who knows that the suffering serves a purpose so great that even the anguish of refusing his child's plea is worth enduring. The Father's silence in Gethsemane was not the silence of indifference. It was the silence of a love so fierce that it was willing to endure the unbearable for the sake of the world.

The Holy Spirit, too, was involved in this Trinitarian drama of suffering. As we explored in Chapter 21, the Spirit is described as One who can be grieved (Ephesians 4:30) and who intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26). At the cross, the Spirit who had anointed Jesus for His ministry (Luke 4:18), who had empowered Him throughout His earthly life, was present in the agony of Calvary. The cross was not a solitary event affecting only the Son. It was a Trinitarian event — all three persons were involved, and all three were genuinely affected.²³

Moltmann and The Crucified God

No modern theologian has done more to bring the suffering of God at the cross to the center of theological attention than Jürgen Moltmann. His groundbreaking 1974 work, The Crucified God, remains one of the most powerful and provocative books in twentieth-century theology. Moltmann deserves to be heard carefully — both for what he gets right and for where he goes too far.

Moltmann's central argument can be summarized in a single sentence: the cross is an event within the Trinity. At Calvary, the Father and the Son both suffer — though they suffer differently. The Son suffers dying. The Father suffers the death of the Son. As Moltmann himself put it:

We cannot therefore say here in patripassian terms that the Father also suffered and died. The suffering and dying of the Son, forsaken by the Father, is a different kind of suffering from the suffering of the Father in the death of the Son.... The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son. The grief of the Father here is just as important as the death of the Son. The Fatherlessness of the Son is matched by the Sonlessness of the Father.²⁴

This is a stunning formulation, and I believe it captures something profoundly true. Moltmann is right that the cross was not simply something that happened to the Son while the Father looked away. The Father was involved. The Father grieved. The Father suffered — not the same suffering as the Son, but a real and distinct suffering of His own. The "Fatherlessness of the Son" is matched by the "Sonlessness of the Father." Both experiences are real. Both matter.

Moltmann is also right that the cross must be understood in Trinitarian terms. The traditional "two natures" framework, on its own, can lead to the impression that the cross was merely a transaction involving Christ's human nature — a divine person going through the motions of human suffering while His divinity remained untouched. Moltmann pushes back against this with considerable force. If the cross is emptied of divine participation — if God Himself did not truly suffer there — then the cross loses its power to reveal who God is and what God is like.²⁵

Furthermore, Moltmann insists that we take seriously the cry of dereliction — Jesus' agonized words from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34). For Moltmann, this was not merely a human feeling of abandonment. It was a real event within the relationship between Father and Son. Jesus experienced something that can only be described as forsakenness — and the Father experienced the anguish of having to forsake His own Son. The Spirit, too, participated in this drama, proceeding from the suffering love of Father and Son to bring reconciliation to the world.²⁶

Roberto Sirvent helpfully summarizes Moltmann's vision: the cross is not the story of a detached and unmoved physician who cures a patient by merely prescribing a pill. Rather, the cross represents God's identification with the brokenhearted as the primary means by which He brings true restoration and healing. As Moltmann writes elsewhere: "God and suffering are no longer contradictions.... God's being is in suffering and the suffering is in God's being itself, because God is love."²⁷

Where Moltmann Goes Too Far

Having acknowledged the power and insight of Moltmann's argument, I must also point out where I believe he goes wrong. There are at least three significant problems with his position.

First, Moltmann tends to make suffering constitutive of God's eternal nature. For Moltmann, the cross is not merely something that happened in time — it is the defining event of God's eternal identity. Drawing on Rahner's axiom that "the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity," Moltmann argues that what happened at Calvary reaches back into eternity and defines who God has always been. The cross, in this view, is not something God freely chose to do in response to human sin. It is something God had to do because suffering is built into the very fabric of His being.²⁸

I reject this. The cross was a free act of love, not a necessary expression of God's eternal nature. God did not need to suffer in order to be who He is. The intra-Trinitarian life of Father, Son, and Spirit was already fully blessed, fully loving, and fully relational before creation. God chose to create. God chose to enter into covenant with creatures. God chose to become incarnate. And God chose to go to the cross. Every step of the way, God's suffering was freely embraced, not imposed by some inner necessity. As Kim argues, since all the movements of God ad extra (toward the world) have the character of freedom, the triune God is free to love and suffer for the world — and Scripture calls this "grace" (Ephesians 2:8).²⁹

Second, Moltmann sometimes blurs the distinction between the Father's suffering and the Son's suffering in ways that approach patripassianism. While Moltmann explicitly denies patripassianism, his language sometimes makes the Father's involvement in the crucifixion sound more direct than is warranted. He speaks of the cross as an event within God's being, as if the crucifixion is something that happens to God in His essential nature. This risks collapsing the distinction between the persons — which is precisely what patripassianism does. Moltmann is right that the Father suffered, but the Father's suffering must remain clearly distinct from the Son's.³⁰

Third, Moltmann's Trinitarian theology can lead to troubling conclusions about God's relationship to creation. By collapsing the distinction between the immanent Trinity (God as He is in Himself) and the economic Trinity (God as He reveals Himself in salvation history), Moltmann risks making God dependent on creation. If the cross eternally constitutes who God is, then God needs creation — and specifically, needs sin and suffering — in order to be Himself. This is dangerously close to making evil necessary for God's self-realization, which is both philosophically absurd and biblically untenable. As Lister notes, critics have rightly observed that Moltmann's view flirts with panentheism and denies God's self-sufficiency.³¹

Peter Vande Brake has made a perceptive observation along these lines: for Moltmann, God's suffering with humanity seems to be more central than the forgiveness of sins through Christ's death and resurrection. This gets things backward. The cross is, first and foremost, God's answer to human sin — His act of atoning sacrifice, His victory over death and evil. It is also a revelation of God's suffering love. But if we lose the atoning dimension and focus only on God's solidarity in suffering, we are left with a God who shares our pain but cannot actually save us from it.³²

Eberhard Jüngel and the Death of God

Eberhard Jüngel takes Moltmann's argument a step further. Where Moltmann speaks of death in God, Jüngel speaks of the death of God. For Jüngel, the cross is the place where God discloses the mystery of His being. By identifying with Christ's death, God experiences the alienation and "relationlessness" of death. Yet it is precisely God's eternal love that motivates this self-emptying act. As Jüngel explains, when all relationships have been broken, only love can create new ones. By allowing Himself to be defined by the death of Jesus, God changes the very nature of death.³³

Jüngel's insight is powerful: the cross reveals that God's love is stronger than death. By entering into the full reality of human death — including its loneliness, its finality, its horror — God transforms death from the inside out. Death is no longer the end of all relationships. It is, paradoxically, the beginning of a new relationship between God and humanity, forged in the fire of divine love.

At the same time, the language of "the death of God" requires careful qualification. God did not cease to exist at the cross. The divine nature did not perish. What died was the incarnate Son — God the Son in His human nature. The "death of God" language is powerful as a theological metaphor, but it must not be pressed into the service of the claim that divinity itself can be extinguished. The extra Calvinisticum reminds us that even during the crucifixion, the Son continued to sustain the universe by His divine power. The cross was real suffering, real death — but it was not the annihilation of the divine being.³⁴

Weinandy's Response: The Classical Impassibilist Case

Having considered the passibilist arguments, we must give a fair hearing to the strongest contemporary defense of the impassibilist position. Thomas Weinandy has argued, with considerable sophistication, that God can be genuinely involved in the suffering of Christ without undergoing any change in His emotional state. On Weinandy's view, the persons of the Trinity are "subsistent relations fully in act" — they are completely and utterly passionate in their self-giving to one another, but they never change, because they are already fully actualized. There is no unrealized potential in God, no room for new emotions to emerge. God's love is always already perfect, always already complete.³⁵

For Weinandy, this means that the Father's grief at the cross is not an emotional change of state but an eternal expression of His fully actualized love. As he puts it, while grief and sorrow are predicated of the Father metaphorically, what is expressed within these metaphors is nonetheless absolutely true. The Father does not undergo emotional changes — but He eternally "grieves" in some fully actualized, unchanging sense.³⁶

I have already noted my concern with this position: a grief that never begins, never intensifies, never responds to a specific event in time, and never changes is not really grief at all. It is a permanent property of God's nature — like omniscience or omnipotence — not a genuine emotional response to a real event. Weinandy's formulation has the virtue of taking the language of divine grief seriously (he insists it is "absolutely true"), but it strips that language of the very features that make grief what it is: its responsiveness, its particularity, its temporal character.

Lister offers a perceptive critique of Weinandy at this point. He notes that Weinandy's strong affinity for the Creator/creature distinction should have protected him from disallowing even God's own voluntary change of emotional disposition. By precluding even voluntary emotional participation on God's part, Weinandy "departs from an otherwise strong analogical position" and obligates himself to defend a more forceful version of impassibility than is biblically necessitated.³⁷

Kim, too, raises important concerns. He points out that Weinandy's approach — in which God's emotions are fully actualized and never change — cannot adequately account for the particular suffering of each divine person at the cross. If the Father's grief never changes, then there is no difference between God's emotional state before the cross and after it. But this seems to empty the cross of its significance as an event that genuinely affected God.³⁸

I want to be fair to Weinandy. He is a serious theologian who has made important contributions to this debate. His emphasis on the Creator/creature distinction, on God's self-sufficiency, and on the intra-Trinitarian relational fulfillment of the divine persons are all valuable insights. But his denial that God could experience even voluntary changes of emotional disposition goes beyond what the biblical evidence warrants — and it creates more problems than it solves.³⁹

Cole's "Essential Impassibility and Affect Passibility"

Graham Cole, writing in the Divine Suffering volume edited by Andrew Schmutzer, offers what I believe is one of the most helpful frameworks for thinking about this issue. Cole proposes that we distinguish between "essential impassibility" and "affect passibility." Let me explain each of these terms in plain language.⁴⁰

Essential impassibility means that God's fundamental moral character never changes, no matter what happens in creation. God's holiness, justice, love, goodness, and wisdom are not threatened by anything creatures do. No amount of human sin can corrupt God's character. No amount of human suffering can overwhelm God's sovereignty. God's essential nature — who He is at the deepest level — is rock-solid and unshakable. In this sense, God is impassible: His character cannot be destroyed by creatures.⁴¹

Affect passibility means that God genuinely experiences emotions — including suffering — in response to what happens in the world. When God chooses to create, He also chooses to open Himself to being emotionally affected by His creatures. God feels genuine grief when His children rebel. He feels genuine compassion when they suffer. He feels genuine joy when they repent. And at the cross, He felt genuine anguish — the Father in watching His Son die, the Son in bearing the weight of human sin, the Spirit in accompanying both through the darkest hour of redemptive history.⁴²

Cole argues that we can affirm both essential impassibility and affect passibility without contradiction. God's character does not change. But God's emotional experience does genuinely respond to what happens in history. He is, in Richard Creel's memorable phrase, "emotionally touched" by the experiences of His creatures but not "emotionally crushed" by them. Creaturely actions do not destroy the divine character. But they do genuinely move God's heart.⁴³

Cole describes this position as "Biblically Qualified Impassibility." It is impassibility in the sense that God's essential nature cannot be overcome or destroyed. But it is qualified by the biblical evidence, which overwhelmingly portrays God as a being who genuinely feels, genuinely responds, and is genuinely affected by what His creatures do. As we have argued throughout this book (see especially Chapters 11–21), the biblical witness consistently and pervasively describes God as emotionally engaged with His world. Cole's framework preserves the legitimate concerns of the impassibility tradition (God's sovereignty, self-sufficiency, and moral constancy) while doing justice to the biblical portrait of a God who genuinely feels.⁴⁴

Kasper's Formulation: Suffering in a Divine Manner

The German Catholic theologian Walter Kasper offers a complementary insight. He writes: "If God suffers, then he suffers in a divine manner, that is, his suffering is an expression of his freedom; suffering does not befall God, rather he freely allows it to touch him."⁴⁵

This is beautifully put, and it captures something essential about the author's position. God's suffering is not like human suffering in every respect. Human beings often suffer involuntarily — suffering is imposed on us against our will, and it can overwhelm us, break us, and destroy us. God's suffering is different. It is free. It is sovereign. It is chosen. God allows the pain of the world to touch Him — not because He has no choice, but because He loves. His suffering is an expression of His freedom, not a limitation of it.

This is the key distinction that separates the author's position from both strict impassibility and process theology. Against strict impassibility, I affirm that God genuinely suffers — the cross was real anguish for the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Against process theology, I affirm that God's suffering is freely chosen, not imposed by necessity. God did not have to create. God did not have to become incarnate. God did not have to go to the cross. Every step of the way, God acted out of sovereign, free, self-giving love. As I argued in Chapter 5, the difference between the God of process theology and the God of the Bible is the difference between a fellow prisoner and a rescuer. The process God suffers with us but cannot save us. The biblical God suffers with us and saves us — because His suffering is backed by omnipotent, sovereign love.⁴⁶

Kim's Dynamic Reciprocity and the Cross

J. D. Kim's Constructing a Mediating Theology provides a crucial Trinitarian framework for understanding divine suffering at the cross. Kim argues that within the economy of salvation (what theologians call the "economic Trinity"), the three divine persons freely determine and accomplish their redemptive operations together. The salvation history that climaxes on the cross is not simply the individual activity of the Son but embraces the distinct and unified activities of all three persons.⁴⁷

Kim develops two key insights through what he calls the "dynamic reciprocity model." First, he explores how each of the three persons freely determines their particular role in the event of the cross. The Father determines to send the Son. The Son determines to obey the Father even unto death. The Spirit determines to accompany the Son through His ministry, passion, and resurrection. These are not imposed roles — they are freely chosen expressions of the mutual love between the divine persons.⁴⁸

Second, Kim illuminates how each divine person's suffering is connected to the suffering of the others. The Son bore the heavy burden of suffering in His divine and human natures, undergoing the salvific suffering required to save sinners. The Father suffered the pain of forsaking the Son — fully knowing the Son's divinity and righteousness, yet delivering Him up to crucifixion as the plan of salvation demanded. The Spirit accompanied the Son from birth to crucifixion and witnessed the relationship of forsakenness between Father and Son at the end of the road to Golgotha.⁴⁹

What is particularly valuable about Kim's analysis is his insistence that the cross is both a moment of deepest separation and a moment of deepest unity among the divine persons. The Trinitarian event of the cross is a paradox: there is at the same time an event of abandonment of the Son by the Father and a maintaining of the Trinitarian fellowship of love. Even when the persons seem most divided and estranged, they are always unified in the unbreakable unity of divine love. It is within the context of the Father's great and unbreakable love for the Son that he suffers the pain of the crucifixion.⁵⁰

Kim's treatment of the Holy Spirit's involvement in the cross also deserves attention. The Spirit, who accompanies the Son from His birth through His ministry and finally to the cross, witnesses the relationship of forsakenness between Father and Son at the end of the road to Golgotha. Yet the Spirit continues perfectly to love both Father and Son even in this darkest hour. The Spirit's suffering is the suffering of the bond of love — the one who unites Father and Son experiencing the strain of their separation at Calvary. As Michael Horton has helpfully observed, it is not that the divine persons perform different works at the cross, but that they are engaged differently in every work. The Father sends, the Son obeys, and the Spirit empowers and accompanies — but all three are genuinely present in and genuinely affected by the events of Good Friday.⁶⁴

Kim's insistence on the freedom of the divine persons' suffering is also critical. The salvation history that climaxes on the cross is not simply something that happened to God against His will. It is something that all three persons freely determined, freely chose, and freely carried out. The Father was not forced to send the Son. The Son was not coerced into obeying. The Spirit was not reluctantly dragged along. Every step was a free act of love — sovereign, purposeful, and costly. This is what separates the author's position from process theology. In process theology, God suffers because He has no choice — His nature makes suffering inevitable. In the biblical picture, God suffers because He freely chooses to love — and love, as we have argued throughout this book, involves genuine vulnerability to the one who is loved.

This is a profound insight. The cross does not tear the Trinity apart. Rather, the cross reveals the depth of the Trinity's love. The Father's willingness to send the Son, the Son's willingness to obey the Father, and the Spirit's willingness to accompany both through the horror of Calvary — all of this displays a love so deep that it can endure even the agony of the cross without breaking. The cross is not a crisis for the Trinity. It is the Trinity's greatest act of unified, self-giving love. (For a fuller treatment of the Trinitarian dimensions of divine emotion, see Chapter 27.)

The Incarnation Was the Consequence of Divine Passibility

There is one more insight that deserves careful attention, and it may be the most important of all. Many theologians have assumed that divine passibility — if it exists at all — began with the incarnation. On this view, God was impassible before He became incarnate, and He became passible only by taking on human flesh. The incarnation, in other words, is what made God capable of suffering.

I believe the reverse is true. The incarnation did not make God passible. Rather, God's eternal passibility — His eternal capacity to be moved by love, to be affected by the plight of His creatures, to grieve over their rebellion and rejoice over their return — is what motivated the incarnation. As Lee has argued, "divine passibility was not the consequence of the incarnation but the incarnation was the consequence of divine passibility."⁵¹

Think about it this way. Why did God become incarnate? The answer Scripture gives is love. "God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son" (John 3:16, ESV). "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8, NIV). The incarnation happened because God loved. And love — as we have argued throughout this book (see especially Chapter 22) — involves being genuinely affected by the beloved. A God who is utterly unaffected by the plight of His creatures has no reason to become incarnate. Why would an impassible God go to the trouble of becoming human if He were perfectly content to observe creation from a state of undisturbed bliss?

The answer, of course, is that He would not. The incarnation makes sense only if God is the kind of God who is genuinely moved by the suffering of His creatures. The incarnation is the supreme expression of a love that was always there — a love that always involved being affected, always involved caring, always involved suffering alongside the beloved. The cross did not create a new emotional reality in God. It revealed an eternal one.

Bonhoeffer: A God Who Lets Himself Be Pushed Out

Before we move to our conclusion, it is worth hearing a voice from the prison cells of Nazi Germany. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing his famous letters from Tegel Prison in 1944, penned some of the most haunting reflections on divine suffering in modern theology. He wrote: "God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us."⁵²

Bonhoeffer's point is not that God is literally weak. It is that God's power operates through vulnerability, not through coercion. The cross reveals a God who conquers not by force but by love — a love that is willing to be wounded, willing to suffer, willing to die. This is not the God of the philosophers — the unmoved mover who sits atop the chain of being in serene self-contemplation. This is the God of the Bible — the God who enters into the depths of human suffering and transforms it from the inside out.

Bonhoeffer wrote these words from a prison cell, facing his own death at the hands of the Nazis. He knew what suffering felt like. And he found comfort not in the idea of a God who was beyond suffering, but in the reality of a God who suffered alongside him. This is the pastoral power of a theology of divine passibility — and it is the pastoral failure of strict impassibility. In the darkest moments of human existence, people do not need a God who is untouchable. They need a God who has been touched by the darkness and has overcome it.⁵³

Kitamori: The Pain of God

The Japanese theologian Kazoh Kitamori, writing in 1946 in the aftermath of Japan's devastation in World War II, developed a profound theology of divine pain. For Kitamori, pain is not merely something God allows or observes — it is something God experiences at the deepest level of His being. The cross is the supreme manifestation of God's pain: in it, God embraces the very thing that causes Him the deepest anguish — the sin and death of His beloved creatures — and transforms it through love. As Kitamori argued, the whole life of Jesus was a via dolorosa, a way of pain, and Jesus is the "personification of God's pain."⁵⁴

Kitamori explicitly distanced himself from patripassianism, insisting that he never identified the Father as the one who suffered on the cross. The Son suffered on the cross. But the Father's pain is real — the pain of a God whose love compels Him to sacrifice what is most precious to Him for the sake of those who have rebelled against Him. This is the heart of the gospel, for Kitamori: God's pain is the measure of His love.⁵⁵

The Cross and the Impassibility Debate: Drawing the Threads Together

Let me now draw together the various threads of this chapter into a coherent position.

First, the incarnation reveals what was always true about God. Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God. His emotional life — His compassion, His grief, His anger, His joy, His love, His distress — is a window into the heart of the eternal God. If Jesus reveals the Father (John 14:9), and Jesus was deeply, genuinely, passionately emotional (Chapter 20), then God is deeply, genuinely, passionately emotional.

Second, the Chalcedonian framework, properly understood, supports rather than undermines divine passibility at the cross. Persons, not natures, are the subjects of experience. The person who suffered on the cross is a divine person — God the Son. His human nature was the instrument through which the suffering was experienced, but He was the one who experienced it. The communicatio idiomatum allows us to say that God suffered — genuinely, truly suffered — at the cross.

Third, the Father experienced genuine anguish at the cross. This is not patripassianism — the Father was not crucified. But the Father grieved the death of His Son with the fierce, unbearable grief of a parent who watches a child die. Weinandy's attempt to make this grief "metaphorical" while simultaneously insisting it is "absolutely true" reveals the internal tension in the impassibilist position.

Fourth, Moltmann is right that the cross is a Trinitarian event, but wrong to make suffering constitutive of God's eternal nature. The cross reveals God's character — it does not create it. God's suffering at the cross was free, sovereign, and loving — not necessary, imposed, or constitutive of who God is.

Fifth, Cole's framework of "essential impassibility and affect passibility" provides the best way forward. God's essential character is unchanging — His holiness, justice, love, and sovereignty cannot be destroyed by creatures. But God genuinely experiences emotions, including suffering, in response to what happens in history. The cross is the supreme example of this: God's character did not change at Calvary, but God's heart was broken.

Sixth, Kasper's formulation captures the crucial distinction: God suffers in a divine manner. His suffering is an expression of His freedom, not a limitation of it. Suffering does not befall God — He freely allows it to touch Him. This distinguishes the author's position from both strict impassibility (which denies that suffering touches God at all) and process theology (which makes God's suffering involuntary and necessary).

Seventh, and finally, the incarnation was the consequence of divine passibility, not its cause. God became incarnate because He was already the kind of God who is moved by the suffering of His creatures. The cross reveals what was always true: God is a God of passionate, self-giving, suffering love.⁵⁶

The Pastoral and Theological Implications

The implications of this chapter reach far beyond academic theology. If God truly suffered at the cross — if the agony of Calvary touched the heart of the eternal God — then several things follow for how we live as Christians.

First, we worship a God who understands. When we bring our pain to God in prayer, we are not presenting our suffering to a distant, untouchable monarch who observes our agony with serene detachment. We are presenting our suffering to a God who knows what suffering feels like — from the inside. The writer of Hebrews tells us, "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" (Hebrews 4:15, ESV). Jesus knows. And because Jesus is God, God knows.

Second, the cross transforms our understanding of power. The world defines power as the ability to be unaffected — to stand above the fray, untouched by the suffering of those beneath us. The cross turns this definition on its head. At Calvary, we see that the greatest power in the universe is not the power to be unaffected but the power to love — even when love costs everything. God's power is not diminished by His suffering. It is revealed in it.⁵⁷

Third, the cross tells us that vulnerability is not a weakness but a perfection. As Sirvent has argued (and as we will explore further in Chapter 31), if God is impassible, He is not worth imitating — because He lacks the very qualities (compassion, empathy, emotional engagement) that we recognize as the highest human virtues. But if God is passible — if He genuinely enters into the suffering of His creatures — then vulnerability is not a human defect but a divine attribute. The greatest love is not love that protects itself. It is love that risks everything for the sake of the beloved.⁵⁸

Fourth, the cross connects directly to the theodicy question (which we will address in detail in Chapters 28–30). If God suffered at Calvary, then the problem of evil takes on a different character. The question is no longer merely "Why does God allow suffering?" but "Where is God in our suffering?" And the answer the cross gives is: He is here. He is in the pain. He is bearing it alongside us. And He is using it — transforming it — through the power of His redemptive love.

Conclusion

The cross of Jesus Christ is the ultimate revelation of who God is. It tells us that God is not a distant, untouchable deity who observes the world from a position of detached bliss. He is a God who enters into the deepest human suffering, bears it in His own being, and transforms it through love. The Father's anguish, the Son's agony, and the Spirit's groaning at Calvary are not merely human emotions that have nothing to do with God's true nature. They are windows into the eternal heart of God — a heart that has always loved, always cared, always been moved by the plight of His creatures.

As we have seen, the cross did not make God passible. It revealed that He always was. The God who wept at the tomb of Lazarus, who burned with righteous anger in the temple, who ached over the rebellion of Israel, who rejoiced over every repentant sinner — this God has always been a God of passionate emotional engagement. The incarnation and the cross are the climax of a story that begins in Genesis 1 and runs through every page of Scripture: the story of a God who will stop at nothing — not even death — to be with His creatures in their suffering and to rescue them from it.

We worship a crucified God. Not a God who merely decreed the crucifixion. Not a God who observed the crucifixion from a comfortable distance. But a God who entered into the crucifixion — who felt it, who bore it, who bled and wept and cried out in the darkness. And because He did, we can be certain of this: there is no suffering in all of creation that God does not understand. There is no darkness so deep that His love has not already been there. And there is no pain so great that His heart has not already borne it.

The cross tells us who God is. And who God is — is love. A love that suffers. A love that bears all things. A love that endures all things. A love that never, ever gives up.⁵⁹