Undying Love: Comfort in God's Impassibility Amidst Suffering
Personal Journey and Initial Struggle with Incurable Cancer
Diagnosis and Initial Reaction: The author, J. Todd Billings, was diagnosed with an incurable blood cancer, which had already caused bone loss in his skull, arm, and hip.
His initial reaction was expressed through the lament of Psalm 102: "My days pass away like smoke and my bones burn like a furnace." He prayed, "Do not take me away at the midpoint of my life," especially considering his young children (ages one and three).
Treatment Regimen:
Within a week, he began chemotherapy and steroids, leading to a stem-cell transplant.
The "transplant" is clarified as a misnomer; it involves a lethal dose of chemotherapy (derived from mustard gas) followed by the reinfusion of previously withdrawn and frozen stem cells to regenerate the immune system.
The procedure required a month in the hospital and three months in quarantine.
The Paradox of Grief Amidst Recovery
Unexpected Worsening of Grief: Despite the stem-cell transplant lowering cancer levels and reactivating his immune system, his grieving worsened.
He felt like the "lonely bird on the housetop" (Psalm 102) while in a cancer lodge for quarantined patients.
Realization of a Changed Life:
He realized his life would "never be the same" due to anticipated "maintenance" chemotherapy and the expectation of cancer recurrence, requiring more intensive and different treatments.
This led to feelings of alienation, fear for his children, and uncertainty about how to re-engage with normal life and look toward the future.
Facing the Inevitability of Death:
The rapid deaths of two friends with cancer, moving from experimental chemotherapy to palliative care to death, made him question the purpose of his remission.
He felt his life spinning towards death, not re-entering a purposeful, joyous recovery, feeling "forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave" (Psalm 88:5).
Internal vs. External Perception: While his physical symptoms waned and friends rejoiced at his progress, he grieved internally, feeling like mourning was unfitting at this stage of recovery. He described suffering as a "free fall" rather than a controlled descent.
Finding Consolation in Christ's Suffering
Consolation from Scripture:
Hebrews 5:7 provided solace: "During the days of Jesus' life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission."
This showed him that his own "fervent cries and tears" were not unprecedented; Christ had plunged deeper into darkness.
Christ's Solidarity in Lament:
When Christ on the cross lamented with Psalm 22, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" His desolation meant that human cries of anguish are not a "free fall."
In Christ, God took on human suffering, alienation, and dread, allowing for profound hope even in unspeakable anguish.
Heidelberg Catechism and Ambrose:
The Heidelberg Catechism testifies that Christ's suffering delivers believers from "hellish anguish and torment."
Ambrose stated, "Even as His death made an end of death, and His stripes healed our scars, so also His sorrow took away our sorrow."
Critique of Contemporary Views on "Divine Suffering"
Problematic Academic and Popular Piety: The author found no comfort in common contemporary ideas of God suffering:
"Since God is relational and loving, God is 'suffering with me.'"
God identifies with sufferers in calamities.
Christ's suffering expresses "divine suffering," an essential part of God's identity.
Lack of Solace: During his ordeal of shots, headaches, and fatigue, these ideas troubled rather than consoled him.
They did not offer hope against the "free fall" feeling.
If Christ's suffering doesn't triumph over death, then hope is lost.
If Christ's suffering isn't a revelation of God's faithful, impassible love, the cross loses its solace.
The Doctrine of Divine Impassibility: A Source of Comfort
Finding Comfort in Impassibility: The author "clung to a different sense of God's saving solidarity": the doctrine of divine impassibility.
As his life was drained by cancer, he found profound comfort in God's unlimited power of life.
James 1:17: "Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows."
Impassibility affirms God's steady, indomitable love and His ability to overcome human terror in Christ.
Definition and Nuances of Divine Impassibility
Core Belief: God has no "passions" – no disordered affections that make His love fluctuate.
God's Affections are Perfect: God delights in creation and obedience, has compassion, hears cries, grieves over sin, and is angry at evil. However, these are fundamentally different from human affections.
God is never blindsided or manipulated.
God loves in fullness; His affections are never distorted by sin or controlled by external powers.
In contrast, human grief is a function of bodily vulnerability, and human emotions are often tinged with outer influences, causing us to "reel in surprise and dismay" or act "not like ourselves."
God's affections are always in accord with His holy and gracious character, perfect, self-derived expressions of His covenant love.
God's jealousy (e.g., Exodus 20:5) is righteous, not like human jealousy (e.g., 1 Corinthians 3:3), because God is not wounded or at a loss.
Countering Misconceptions: Impassibility is often caricatured as God being apathetic, but it's the opposite.
As Paul Gavrilyuk states, God's impassibility (freedom from uncontrollable vengeance) allows repentant sinners to approach Him without despair; it is the foundation of divine care and loving-kindness.
Biblical and Historical Foundations
Biblically Rooted: Not imported wholesale from Greek philosophy, but refined through biblical exegesis and debates in the 4th and 5th centuries as the Church developed Trinitarian and Christological confessions.
Council of Chalcedon: Affirmed the integrity of Christ's two natures and condemned priests who claimed "the divinity of the Only-begotten is passible."
Old and New Testament Witness:
Reflects Old Testament testimony to God's faithful, covenant love.
Protects the integrity of the New Testament witness to the transcendent God taking on humanity in Christ – fully God and fully human in one person.
Gavrilyuk: "God, as God, does not replicate what we, as humans, suffer. Yet in the Incarnation, God, remaining God, participates in our condition to the point of the painful death on the cross. Remaining impassible, God chooses to make the experiences of his human nature fully his own."
The Incarnation: God's True Solidarity with Suffering
Refutation of "God Hurting When You Do":
The common greeting card message "Does God hurt when you do? Absolutely" aims to convey God's intimate compassion but incorrectly suggests God mirrors human pain like a Rogerian therapist.
The author argues this identification is not truly helpful because human pain and suffering are profoundly bodily realities (mouth sores, fatigue, injections, anguish).
As Elaine Scarry notes in The Body in Pain, "Physical pain has no voice," and human suffering is inseparable from bodily pain. To quickly speak of a non-bodily, non-human "God suffering" becomes an abstraction, offering no solace or companionship.
Incarnation as the True Nature of Divine Suffering:
Christian teaching affirms that in the Incarnation, the Son assumes human suffering and death to conquer them, emptying them of their finality.
God embraces us with perfect compassion in Christ, fulfilling Isaiah's Suffering Servant (Isaiah 53:3) and providing a High Priest who sympathizes with weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15).
Hope comes not from God being overtaken by suffering like humans, but from God, in Christ, taking on human suffering and death to deny their power to define our lives.
Paradox of Worship: Charles Wesley's hymn "Amazing love! How can it be, That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me? 'Tis mystery all: th'Immortal dies" captures this paradox.
It hinges on the union of the holy, transcendent God with the suffering, dying humanity of Jesus Christ.
The Creator became flesh, obedient "even to death on a cross" (Philippians 2:8), reconciling humanity to God (2 Corinthians 5:18).
Redemption of Bodily Suffering: Gregory of Nazianzus: In the Incarnation, God the Son "remained what he was; what he was not, he assumed," and "what is united with God is also being saved."
Thus, human suffering in its "messy bodiliness" is redeemed because God assumed a bodily, human suffering.
"He is weakened, wounded—yet he cures every disease and every weakness." Christ's bruises bring healing, even for "incurable cancer."
Critique of Jürgen Moltmann's Theology of Suffering
Moltmann's "Abandonment" and "Division in God":
Moltmann asserts a "separation between the Son and the Father" on the cross, calling it a "deep division in God himself" to rethink God's nature after Auschwitz.
The author argues this denies that Jesus's cry from Psalm 22 establishes solidarity with sufferers, emphasizing God's promise not to forsake His people.
Romanticizing Suffering:
By making suffering internal to the divine nature, Moltmann describes a God who "loves" as part of a divine self-realization project, rather than a God of genuine, freely-entering covenantal love.
David Bentley Hart argues that a God who must suffer in His nature to be loving implies goodness requires evil; love driven by pain cannot be the God who is love.
Moltmann's view expounds "God is love" (1 John 4:8) but ignores "God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all" (1 John 1:5).
A "Kinder, Gentler" God is Useless:
Modern theologians seeking a "reciprocal" God may charm academic audiences but are "useless for sufferers desperate for deliverance."
Moltmann "romanticizes suffering" and treats empathy as sufficient, when a sovereign Lord is needed.
Need for a Sovereign Lord: The author needed to know that God's covenant love is so steady and powerful that, in Christ, suffering and death lose their dominion, not just a God who "hurts" with him.
God doesn't need suffering to be God; instead, in perfect covenantal love, God becomes incarnate as the Pioneer, Brother, High Priest who sympathizes (Hebrews 4:15).
This is steadfast, trustworthy love, not "a deep division in God himself."
The Power and Steadfastness of God's Covenant Love
Comprehending Christ's Love: The author rediscovered the importance of Paul's prayer for the Ephesians to "have the power to comprehend" the "breadth and length and height and depth" () of Christ's love.
God's love is not frail like human love; it "surpasses knowledge."
It is the steadiness of God's covenant love that allows access to Him amidst human anguish and frailty.
Renewed Trust and Open-Handed Prayer:
He developed more open-handed prayers, trusting a generous God even when petitions are not followed exactly.
Like Job, he realized the risks of loving others due to human suffering and death.
He emerged with a deeper trust in God's loving promise because "it is impossible for God to lie" (), unlike fickle humans.
Conclusion: An Undying Love
The author finds ultimate comfort and reassurance in God's impassibility, which allows God's love to remain steady and effective, ultimately overcoming suffering and death through the Incarnation of Christ. This provides a profound hope beyond mere identification with suffering.