Does God Suffer? - Notes
The Question of God's Suffering: Impassibility vs. Passibility
Introduction: The Question of God's Suffering
This article explores whether God suffers, a question pertinent to the Church's task of communicating the Gospel in a culture valuing compassion and empathy.
The author, Thomas G. Weinandy, argues against the temptation to speak of God as suffering.
Historical Overview: Impassibility vs. Passibility
Patristic Period (Dawn of Christianity): Christian theology axiomatically held that God is impassible, meaning He does not undergo emotional changes of state and thus cannot suffer.
Modern Shift (Late 19^{th} Century to Present): A significant change occurred within Christian theology. Many contemporary theologians now axiomatically hold that God is passible, meaning He does undergo emotional changes of state and can suffer.
Key Proponents of God's Passibility
Anglican Theologians: Andrew M. Fairbairn and Bertrand R. Brasnett inaugurated this shift.
Contemporary Protestant Theologians: Karl Barth, Richard Bauckham, James Cone, Paul Fiddes, Robert Jenson, Eberhard Jüngel, Kazoh Kitamori, Jung Young Lee, John Macquarrie, Jürgen Moltmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Richard Swinburne, Alan Torrance, Thomas F. Torrance, Keith Ward, and Nicholas Wolterstorff.
Catholic Theologians: Raniero Cantalamessa, Jean Galot, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Roger Haight, Elizabeth Johnson, Hans Küng, Michael Sarot, and Jon Sobrino.
Process Theologians: Following Albert North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, they inherently believe God is by nature passible and can suffer, due to their philosophical position.
"New Orthodoxy": Ronald Goetz aptly dubbed this overwhelming theological shift the "new orthodoxy" due to its widespread and unquestioned acceptance.
Factors Contributing to the Shift (Overturning 2000 years of tradition in 100 years)
The prevailing social and cultural milieu.
Modern interpretation of biblical revelation.
Contemporary trends in philosophy.
The Case for a Passible God (and the Author's Critique)
Human Suffering as Catalyst
Origin: Human suffering, particularly social ills in industrial Britain in the late 19^{th} century, became the primary catalyst advocating for a suffering God, based on the idea of God suffering in solidarity with humanity.
Iconic Example: Auschwitz, as depicted in Elie Wiesel's story of a Jewish boy hung at Buna (though Moltmann wrongly placed it in Auschwitz).
Wiesel's interpretation: Expressed disbelief in a loving and just God.
Moltmann's exploitation (in The Crucified God): Used the story to argue for God suffering in union with those who suffer, especially amidst the Holocaust and other human suffering.
The Core Argument: A loving and compassionate God cannot be an immutable, impassible, idle, and indifferent bystander to unspeakable suffering; He must be an "active" victim and suffer Himself.
Biblical Revelation (Modern Interpretation)
Old Testament Passibility: Proponents argue the Old Testament provides ample proof of God's passibility, portraying Him as:
A personal, loving, and compassionate God deeply engaged in human history.
Mercifully hearing and rescuing enslaved people in Egypt.
Grieving over sins, distressed by unfaithfulness, and suffering over His people's plight (especially in the prophets).
Becoming angry, but with internal recoil and tender compassion (e.g., Hosea extbf{ }11:8-9: "my heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and not mortal; the Holy One in your midst and I will not come in wrath").
Suffering on account of, with, and on behalf of His people.
Moltmann: "Were God incapable of suffering in any respect, and therefore in an absolute sense, then He would also be incapable of love."
New Testament / Christian Kerygma: The Incarnation and the cross are central to arguments for God's passibility.
Three Interconnected Levels:
God as Eternally Suffering: God sent His Son precisely because He always suffered with those He loved. The cross is the full expression of God's eternal divine nature, serving as the paradigm of a suffering God.
Divine Suffering from Incarnation: While traditional Christology held the Son suffered as man but not as God, contemporary theologians find this distinction illogical. If the Son became man, His suffering as man must have "washed into" His very divinity.
Father's Suffering and Son's Abandonment: The Son's cry of dereliction on the cross ( ext{e.g.,} ext{ }Matthew extbf{ }27:46 ext{ }or ext{ }Mark extbf{ }15:34) is interpreted as an experience within the depths of God's passible nature. The Father also suffered the loss of His Son.
Philosophical Critique of Impassibility (by Proponents of Passibility)
Greek Philosophy's "Hijack": Contemporary theologians argue that Greek philosophical thought (especially Platonism) distorted biblical revelation. The "static, inert, self-sufficient, immutable, and impassible God of Platonic thought" supposedly usurped the "living, personal, active, loving, and so passible God of the Bible" via Philo and early Church Fathers.
Aquinas's "Deformity": This philosophical and theological distortion is said to have matured into a "deformed offspring" within Scholasticism, particularly in the writings of Aquinas.
Modern "Therapeutic" Redesign: Only recently, especially in the wake of Hegel and the rise of Process Philosophy, have theologians supposedly perceived this deformity and been able to "therapeutically redesign" the gospel's "authentic genetic structure" by affirming God as mutable and passible, thus allowing Him to suffer.
Author's General Rejection
The author acknowledges the intellectual and emotional power of these arguments but considers the entire project for a passible God "utterly misconceived, philosophically and theologically," causing "total havoc upon the authentic Christian gospel."
The Biblical Understanding of God's Transcendence and Immanence
Correct Interpretation of Old Testament Emotional Language
While the Old Testament speaks of God undergoing emotional changes, these passages must be interpreted within the deeper and broader revelation of who God is, focusing on God's transcendence and immanence.
God's immanent actions within the created order are what reveal the character of His transcendence.
Four Fundamental Divine Characteristics (Revealed in Immanent Actions)
The One God: God's unique oneness differentiates Him from all else ("the many"). This uniqueness speaks of His transcendence.
The Savior: God's will and actions as Savior are not frustrated by worldly powers, historical vicissitudes, or natural limitations. His salvific actions demonstrate His complete otherness and transcendence over all cosmic forces.
The Creator: As Creator, God is intimately related to and cares for His creation, yet He is distinct from all created things, thus emphasizing His complete otherness.
All Holy: God's holiness distinguishes Him (Semitic root of "holiness" means "to cut off") from all that is profane and sinful. His transcendence (being "cut-off" and incapable of defilement) is precisely why He can restore others to holiness even when they defile themselves.
Interplay of Transcendence and Immanence
God's transcendence does not mean He is separate from His immanent aspects. What makes God truly divine and transcendent also allows Him to be active and immanent within the created order.
To call God the One, All-Holy Creator and Savior expresses His immanent activity while affirming He is not a member of the created order.
This is the great Judeo-Christian mystery, culminating in the Incarnation: God, who is completely other than creation, can be present and active within it without losing His complete otherness.
Undermining God's transcendent otherness to make Him seem more immanent ironically diminishes the significance of His immanence. The importance of His immanent activity is directly proportional to His transcendence.
Isaiah 40:28: "The Lord [who] is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary, His understanding is unsearchable."
Literal but Non-Literal Interpretation of God's "Changes"
Statements that God undergoes emotional changes or "changes His mind" (e.g., compassion, sorrow, anger, forgiveness) are literally true about God's actions and character but are not to be taken literally as changes in God's being.
They convey that God is truly compassionate and forgiving, that He grieves over sin, and is angry with His people.
Reason 1: Changes in Others, Not God: These emotional states are predicated not upon a change in God but upon a change within the others involved.
God is "sorry" He created humans or appointed Saul king (Genesis 6:6-7; 1 extbf{ }Samuel extbf{ }15:11,35) because they became sinful.
He relents His anger (Jonah 4:2; Exodus 32:14) because people repented.
Such reactions express God's unchanging and unalterable love and justice as the transcendent Other.
Reason 2: God Does Not Change: God is portrayed as undergoing emotional changes precisely because, as the transcendent God, He does not change His mind or undergo emotional changing states.
Numbers 23:9: "God is not a human being, that He should lie, or a mortal, that He should change His mind" (also Psalms 110:4, 132:11; Ezekiel 24:14).
The language of emotions expresses God's unswerving and unalterable transcendent nature as the One All-Holy God who is Savior and Creator.
These are not literal statements of passibility, but rather illustrate that God, being transcendent, is unalterably all-loving, all-good, and all-holy in all circumstances, not fickle like humans.
Ethical vs. Ontological Immutability
Some argue that God's immutability is only ethical (consistently morally good and loving), not ontological (unchanging in His very being).
The author contends that for God to be ethically immutable (unchangeably loving and good) demands that He is also ontologically immutable (ontologically unchanging in His perfect love and goodness).
The Patristic and Scholastic Defense of Impassibility
Refuting the "Greek Philosophy Hijack" Accusation
The accusation that Church Fathers transformed the biblical God into a static, inert, impersonal Greek philosophical God is false, despite occasional missteps.
Early Fathers (Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian, Novatian) brought their faith in the biblical God to philosophical discussions.
Fathers' Core Concerns and Affirmations
Upholding God's Otherness: They upheld the complete otherness of the One God in relation to the created order, against pagan mythologies.
Creatio Ex Nihilo: They accentuated, against Platonism and Aristotelianism, that God created all ex nihilo (out of nothing) by His almighty power, rather than merely ordering preexistent matter.
Distinct Ontological Order: God was not simply at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of being, but His transcendence as Creator placed Him in a distinct ontological order of His own. He is the perfectly good, loving, and personal God who eternally exists in and of Himself.
Negative Attributes and Their Positive Role
The Fathers used negative attributes (e.g., incorporeal, immutable, impassible) to distinguish God from the created order. This also enriched the understanding of His positive attributes.
Example: God is incorporeal, meaning He doesn't have physical feelings, passions, or needs like pain, lust, or hunger, which enhances His spiritual nature.
Immutability in Detail (Fathers' View)
Negatively: God doesn't change as creatures do.
Positively: His immutability profoundly intensifies His absolute perfection and utter goodness. Because His love is unchangeably perfect, He is the eternally living God, unreservedly dynamic in His goodness, love, and perfection.
Impassibility in Detail (Fathers' View)
Primarily Negative: Impassibility tells us what God is not.
Positive Reasons:
He does not undergo successive and fluctuating emotional states.
The created order cannot alter Him or cause Him loss or modification.
He is not susceptible to negative and sinful passions like human desires (fear, anxiety, dread, greed, lust, unjust anger).
Safeguarding God's Passionate Love: For the Fathers, denying God's passibility was not to deny His passion, but to safeguard and enhance His utterly passionate love and all-consuming goodness – His divine fervor and zealous resolve for His people's well-being.
Origen: Ardently upheld impassibility yet spoke of God's "passion of love" for fallen humankind.
God's Anger: Not conceived as a separate passion or intermittent emotional state, but as constitutive of His unchanging perfect goodness and providential care in the face of sin and evil.
Misconception by Contemporary Theologians: Contemporary theologians wrongly assume that impassibility means God is static, lifeless, and devoid of passion. The Fathers never meant this; they merely denied passions that would imperil or impair God's biblical attributes, preserving His "wholly otherness" and enriching the understanding of His passionate love and perfect goodness.
Aquinas's Contribution: God as "Pure Act"
Aquinas deepened the patristic understanding of immutability and impassibility by conceiving God as "being itself" or "pure act."
Act/Potency Scheme: Creatures constantly change by actualizing their potential (for good to become more perfect, or for evil to become less perfect). God is not in this scheme; He cannot undergo self-constituting change to become "more perfect," as He is already perfectly actualized.
Two Pertinent Points from "Pure Act":
Creation as Pure Act: God, as pure act, performs singular acts like creation. The act of creation ensures God's "wholly otherness" while also assuring creation's immediate, intimate, dynamic, and enduring relationship with God as He truly is in all His transcendent otherness.
Perfectly Actualized Love: All that pertains to God's nature is in pure act. Unlike a rock (impassible due to inertness and lack of love), God is impassible because His love is perfectly in act ("God is love"). No further act could make Him more loving. God is absolutely impassible because He is absolutely passionate in His love.
Creatures are thus related to God in His perfectly actualized love through the act of creation.
Theological Consequences of a Passible God
Impassibility of the Trinity
The persons of the Trinity are impassible for similar reasons: they are constituted by their passionate and dynamic fully actualized relationship of love, not devoid of passion.
Father: Pure act of paternity, begetting the Son in perfect love.
Son: Pure act of sonship, wholly Son of and for the Father in the same perfect love.
Spirit: Pure act of love, conforming Father and Son in their loving relationship.
Humans, as created beings, are related to this Trinitarian mystery of love and can participate by being conformed by the Holy Spirit into the likeness of the Son, becoming children of the Father.
Why God Cannot Suffer
Since God's love and goodness are fully actualized, He cannot be deprived of them, which is what causes suffering. Any such loss would make Him less than perfectly loving and good.
Distinct Ontological Order: Crucially, God, though intimately related to creation as Creator, exists in His own distinct ontological order as the Creator.
Sin and Evil Contained in Created Order: Sin and evil, which cause suffering in humans, are contained wholly within the created ontological order. They cannot "reverberate or wash back" into the uncreated order where God alone exists as absolutely good.
If created sin and evil caused God to suffer, it would logically demand that God and the created order exist in the same ontological order.
The Problem of Panentheism
Most theologians advocating a suffering God implicitly or explicitly advocate a panentheistic notion of God (the cosmos is constitutive of God's very being, though God is potentially more).
(Those who espouse a suffering God but deny panentheism fail to grasp the logic of their own position.)
If God is "ensconced" within the cosmic order, He must necessarily assume all that pertains to that order, including sin and its suffering.
Destructive Implications for God's Nature:
He can no longer be an all-loving Creator but becomes like a Platonic Demiurge, merely bringing order to a cosmic process after the fact.
Suffering implies the privation of some good; a suffering God would therefore not be perfectly good.
If God loses His singular transcendence and is infected by evil and suffering, He becomes enmeshed in an evil cosmic process from which He, like all else, cannot escape.
Religious Devastation: Loss of Hope and Divine Justice:
While advocates boast of the value of God suffering in union with all who suffer, this position ultimately deprives humanity, and even God Himself, of any hope of being freed from evil and its suffering.
There is no hope of divine justice setting things right, nor of love and goodness vanquishing evil.
The transcendent, All-Holy God of the Bible (Creator, Savior) vanishes.
Conclusion: A suffering God is "philosophically and theologically untenable" and "religiously devastating."
The Nature of God's Compassion and the True Gospel
God's Fully Actualized Love vs. Human Sequential Love
Human Love: Humans enact various aspects of love sequentially (kindness, compassion, mercy, forgiveness, anger) based on changing situations.
God's Love: God's love is perfectly existent; all its aspects are fully existent simultaneously. God does not need to sequentially enact facets of love according to changing situations, avoiding an "unending internal emotional whirligig."
Humans experience God's unchanging love in various ways according to their personal situation (e.g., as rebuke in sin, as compassion in repentance). It is God's unchanging love moving them.
God's Compassion: Devoid of Suffering
God's compassion is subsumed within His perfectly actualized love, but it is devoid of suffering, which would render His love less than perfect.
He is perfectly compassionate not because He suffers with those who suffer, but because His love fully and freely embraces them.
The absence of suffering in God liberates Him from any self-love that would lead Him to act to relieve His own suffering, allowing His love to be completely altruistic and beneficent.
Humans cry out for a God who loves wholly, not one who suffers, as a suffering God could not love perfectly.
Michael Dodds' Critique of Co-Suffering: If one finds consolation in a friend's compassionate suffering, it implies taking joy in their sadness, a peculiar and contradictory reaction.
Aquinas on Mercy
Aquinas: "mercy is especially to be attributed to God, as seen in its effects, but not as an affection of passion."
The truly compassionate person endeavors to dispel the cause of suffering. God's mercy and compassion are thus manifested in His divine power and perfect goodness, through which He overcomes evil and suffering.
The author agrees that mercy is not a "passible emotional state" but a positive facet of God's perfectly actualized and completely altruistic love.
God's Compassion in Alleviating Sin (The Gospel)
God's compassion is seen in His ability to alleviate the cause of human suffering, which is sin.
The Son's Incarnation and Crucifixion: The eternal Son of God, impassible as God, became an authentic man by the Holy Spirit. He assumed fallen humanity, lived a holy life, and offered His life on the cross as a loving sacrifice of atonement for sin. As man, He truly suffered and died, and truly rose bodily from the dead.
Distinction Between Divine and Human Suffering:
In the authentic Christological tradition, the all-perfect and immutable Son of God experienced human weakness, frailty, suffering, and death truly and authentically as man. "The Impassible suffers" (Cyril of Alexandria).
However, the Son did not suffer within His divinity. Suffering is caused by the loss of some good; as man, He was deprived of human well-being and life, but not of any divine perfection or good.
To claim the Son suffered as God would mean He experienced human suffering in a mitigated, divine manner, thus not truly authentic human suffering. Paradoxically, those who advocate a suffering God, by internalizing suffering into God's divine nature, have "locked God out of human suffering."
Critique of "Son Suffers as God": Contemporary theologians who state the Son suffered as God and the Father suffered with the divine Son reduce the passion and death of Jesus to a myth. The historical event becomes a mere "mythical ahistorical expression" of an inner-Trinitarian event.
The Salvific Significance of Christ's Human Suffering
Authentic Human Suffering is Salvific (Not Mythical)
It was the human suffering and death of the Son, enacted in real history, that is salvific.
The idea that the Father and Son suffer to "extricate themselves" from their own divine suffering replaces the true overcoming of sin and human suffering.
The Father's Role: Approval, Not Co-Suffering
There is no biblical warrant for the Father suffering with His Son. Instead, the Father, while not condoning the execution, was well pleased that His Son, in faithful obedience and love for humankind, willingly offered His human life.
The Resurrection: Validation and Victory
The Father's pleasure is witnessed in raising His Son gloriously from the dead. The bodily resurrection testifies to the salvific nature of Jesus' offering of His human life.
This authenticates the reality and importance of human suffering and death, and ensures that sin, death, and the suffering they cause have been vanquished.
Placing the significance of the Son's suffering within His divine nature would relegate His human suffering and death (and thus all human suffering) to insignificance.
The fully human resurrection of Jesus is the Father's ultimate answer to human suffering.
Human Suffering in the Ecclesial Context
Human suffering must be interpreted in light of Christ as the head of His body, the Church.
Union with Christ: Those who come to faith and are baptized into the risen Lord Jesus are united to Him and are confident (through the Spirit) that they already share in His resurrection amidst their suffering.
They anticipate their own resurrection at Jesus' glorious return, when every evil will be righted and every tear wiped away.
As members of Christ's body, Christians find support within the entire body (saints in heaven and on earth).
Contrast with Generic Consolation of Suffering God Theology: This "ecclesial confidence" is absent in a theology of a suffering God, which offers only consolation from God's co-suffering during isolated suffering.
Such generic consolation undermines evangelism: it suggests that all individuals, regardless of religious affiliation, can experience such comfort, negating the need for Jesus' evangelistic summons.
Jesus is replaced by a generic "suffering being called God" as the source of hope and consolation.
While Christians can bring non-Christians into Christ's orbit of consolation, full participation requires becoming Christian.
Christ's Ongoing Suffering through His Body, the Church
Christians interpret their suffering in light of Jesus, their risen head, and recognize that He continues to suffer with them, His body.
Fathers like Origen and Augustine, based on the New Testament (e.g., Jesus' words to Paul: "Why persecutest thou me?," Acts extbf{ }9:4), argued that Christian suffering is properly attributed to Jesus as their head.
"It is not Christ who shares in the present sufferings of Christians, it is Christians who share in the present sufferings of Christ and so in their own flesh 'complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions'" (Colossians extbf{ }1:24).
While Christ completed salvation, the suffering of righteous men and women continues as Christ's sufferings, thus "completing" or "filling up" His present sufferings.
This suffering is the consolation and glory of Christians:
"For if we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too" (2 extbf{ }Corinthians extbf{ }1:5).
"Equally, 'we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with Him'" (Romans extbf{ }8:17).
Conclusion: The Good News of an Impassible God
God is impassible.
While speaking of an impassible God may go "against the cultural grain" of valuing compassion and empathy, this is the God of Scripture and normative Christian tradition.
The truth that God does not suffer is at the heart of the gospel, making it truly good news.
This stands in contrast to the "bad news" (the "new orthodoxy") that God is as troubled as humanity.
While humans intellectually grapple with God's mystery amidst suffering, it is by becoming saints and martyrs that they begin to fathom and ardently desire the perfect love of the all-good and just Father, made manifest in Jesus Christ, even amidst their own sufferings.