Impassibility of God

“For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.”

— Malachi 3:6

The impassibility of God is the teaching that God does not suffer and cannot be moved into a new emotional state by anything outside himself. His affections are not passions, involuntary reactions imposed on him from without the way grief or anger comes upon a creature, but a fixed, complete disposition that is simply what he eternally is. This does not make God indifferent or unfeeling: it means his love, compassion, and anger toward his creatures are not caused, increased, or diminished by anything they do, but are his own settled and unchanging perfection.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession describes God as “infinite in being and perfection… immutable… a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions.”¹ The denial of “passions” sits beside the denial of “parts”: just as God is not assembled out of separable pieces, he is not carried along by separable, successive emotional states the way a creature moves from calm to anger to grief and back again. Impassibility is this “without… passions” clause read together with the same paragraph’s “immutable”: a denial that God’s inner disposition toward his creatures rises, falls, or changes in response to what they do, since he “does not experience pain or pleasure from the actions of another being.”²

Biblical Basis

Balaam’s own oracle states the principle plainly: “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind” (Num. 23:19), and the same refrain returns when God rejects Saul as king: “the Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man, that he should have regret” (1 Sam. 15:29). Scripture nonetheless says God “repented” that he had made man (Gen. 6:6) and repented of having raised Saul to the kingdom (1 Sam. 15:11). Calvin reads both texts together inside a single chapter of 1 Samuel: verse 11 uses “repent” of God figuratively, and verse 29 immediately denies, without figure, that he is capable of it. The figurative use is accommodation, not a literal report of an inner change: “we ought not to imagine that there is any emotion in him, but ought rather to consider the mode of speech accommodated to our sense,” God appearing to us as one moved by anger or regret only because a change in his outward dealings looks, from a human vantage point, like the change of mind that would produce it in us.³

Historical Development

Patristic and medieval theology held impassibility as settled doctrine, not as a philosophical import at odds with Scripture’s own witness: the church fathers meant it “to ensure and to accentuate [God’s] perfect goodness and unalterable love,” not to make him remote or uninvolved.⁴ Jonathan Edwards later sharpened the vocabulary needed to state the doctrine without implying that God is inert: passions are “sudden” and leave “the mind more overpowered, and less in its own command,” where affections are “vigorous lively actings of the will” that remain, in a way passions do not, under the agent’s own control, language suited to describing God’s fixed disposition toward his creatures without importing creaturely emotional fluctuation.⁵

That patristic consensus broke in the twentieth century. Writing after witnessing the horrors of Nazi Germany, Jürgen Moltmann argued that a God incapable of suffering could offer no real hope to a suffering world, and that the fathers’ “philosophical concept of God,” in which “God’s being is incorruptible, unchangeable, indivisible, incapable of suffering and immortal,” amounted to a “cold heavenly power” that had come “very near to docetism.”⁶ For Moltmann, God himself, Father and Son together, suffered at the cross, and continues to suffer wherever his creatures do: “where we suffer because we love, God suffers in us.”⁷ Moltmann’s theology of a suffering God has proven influential well beyond his own panentheist framework, informing the broader modern turn toward what open theists and others have called a relational, passible doctrine of God.

Opposing Views

Passibilism, most influentially argued by Moltmann, holds that God is genuinely affected by, and changes in response to, his creatures’ condition, supremely at the cross, where the divine nature itself, not only Christ’s humanity, is said to have suffered.⁶ On this view, “any other answer would be blasphemy,” since only a God who himself suffers can be said to truly love a suffering world.⁸

Against this, impassibility holds that a God who suffers is a God who needs rescuing rather than one who can rescue: a God genuinely affected by his creatures’ evil is, to that extent, their victim rather than their redeemer, and his promises are only as reliable as his own unstable emotional state.⁹ What Moltmann reads as coldness, the classical doctrine reads as the very ground of a love that cannot be shaken by anything creatures do.

Objections and Responses

If God is impassible, how could Jesus suffer and die on the cross? The person of the Son, true God and true man in one person, two natures, truly suffered, but as man, not as God. Gregory of Nazianzus states the point as a formula: Christ is “passible in his flesh, impassible in his Godhead.”¹⁰ The same communication of properties that keeps Christ’s deity from acquiring a body also keeps it from acquiring suffering; what is true of either nature is predicated of the one person, not transferred to the other nature. Weinandy presses the point further: if the Son suffered in his divine nature, his suffering would no longer be a genuinely human suffering but “‘human suffering’ in a divine manner,” and so no longer capable of redeeming actual human beings. It is precisely because the person of the Son suffers as man that his suffering is authentically human and therefore able to save humanity.¹¹

Doesn’t impassibility make God a cold, uninvolved abstraction, incapable of real compassion? Impassibility denies that God’s virtues are caused or activated by anything outside him, not that he possesses them. Because his love does not depend on being acted upon, it “could not be any more loving than [it] already is”: impassibility guarantees the very steadfastness that Scripture repeatedly attributes to God’s love, rather than excluding it.¹² A love that could be increased or diminished by its object would not be the settled, unconditional love Scripture describes; it is because God is impassible that his compassion toward his creatures cannot be worn down, exhausted, or provoked into failure.

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩
Peter Sammons, The Forgotten Attributes of God: God’s Nature and Why It Matters (Fort Washington, PA: CLC Publications, 2023), chap. 8, “Impassibility,” 154-172. ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 1, chap. 17, 195-196. ↩
Thomas Weinandy, quoted in Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 7, “Does God Have Emotions? Impassibility.” ↩
Jonathan Edwards, quoted in Sammons, chap. 8, 161-162. ↩
Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, quoted in Barrett, chap. 7. ↩ ↩²
Moltmann, The Crucified God, quoted in Barrett, chap. 7. ↩
Moltmann, The Crucified God, quoted in Barrett, chap. 7. ↩
Barrett, chap. 7. ↩
Gregory of Nazianzus, quoted in Barrett, chap. 7. ↩
Weinandy, quoted in Barrett, chap. 7. ↩
Sammons, chap. 8, 154-172. ↩