Martin Shields offered a series of very thoughtful concerns in response to the last post in my series on impassibility. In the process, he raised a bunch of key issues to do with how we read the Bible. His concerns are profoundly important questions that affect far more than the issue of impassibility. So I’m going to offer in these four posts what I think is at stake in Martin Shields’s concerns and why I disagree with him in the hope that the debate might stimulate all of us forward as we live in the knowledge of God.
Martin Shields’s first concern was to do with how theology and exegesis should relate:
1. Much theologising, particularly in this realm, is somewhat troubling because it is not derived from exegesis so much as an imposition of a framework on exegesis. One example of this has always been the treatment by some theologians and exegetes of the ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ of God in Genesis 1. It can also be seen in some theological treatments of the doctrine of the Trinity, but perhaps most pervasively it appears in theological treatments of the impassibility of God.
My problem with the concern here is that we are given two alternatives. Either theology is derived from exegesis or it imposes a framework upon exegesis. It’s one or the other. But I’d argue exegesis and theology arise together, and it’s hard to unpick the relationship between the two. Good exegetes (Bible readers) are usually decent theologians (people with a good handle on the Bible’s message as a whole). Good theologians are rarely incompetent exegetes.
But let’s imagine that the relationship only works one way. If exegesis only ever produces theology, and theology never helps make exegesis possible, then the best Bible reader would be someone who does not know God at all but has great comprehension skills, is comfortable across a wide range of literary genres, and has a good handle on the history of Israel up to the first century CE. Tone that description down just slightly and you have almost any Bible study group made up of late teen/early 20s university students from a Christian background. They’re fairly competent readers, but aren’t cursed with too much knowledge of what the Bible says. In my experience, such a demographic can make great strides in advancing in the knowledge of God—their exegesis can produce good theology. But they’re hardly my ‘go to’ people to resolve exegetical questions or tricky questions about God, the world and life. They’re good, but I wouldn’t pull a group of them together to write either a commentary or a work on a theological topic.
What is missing in this view that theology derives from exegesis but must not establish frameworks for exegesis is that ignorance may be bliss, but it’s still no virtue. The more I am familiar with something, the more I know it, the better I can see it and understand it. This is true of Shakespeare: most good readings of Shakespeare come from people who have sat with his plays for decades and are on top of Shakespearean scholarship. It’s true of science: most groundbreaking research comes from people who have already have a good grasp of the ‘state of the art’ of knowledge in their field. It’s true of people: those who already know us best are usually better able to ‘read’ our moods and actions than complete strangers. And it’s true of the Bible: most people can read the Bible much better after they have been reading it for a long time and have already come to a lot of conclusions about what it is saying than when they first began reading it and it was all strange to them. They also read it better if someone gives them a head start by teaching them what the Bible says, how it holds together, what the pivot points are and the like, and that then forms a framework for their Bible reading.
Now, of course, there are exceptions: familiarity can breed contempt, and people can try and force something or someone to be nothing more or less than what they already think it is (one reason why a prophet is without honour in their own country). So existing knowledge can actually stop new insights being generated. On the other hand, someone with immense natural flair and aptitude, but little knowledge, can come in fresh and see something everyone else has missed, and so generate an important new element in future bodies of knowledge. But these are exceptions, not the rule. They are singular signs of how truth cannot be domesticated by us, but stands apart from us and over us. However, if they were the rule, then we would never preach or teach the Bible; we would just hold classes on exegetical skills, give people a Bible, and tell them to go away and get on with it.
If someone wants to be a good reader of the Bible, they simply have to equip themselves with a least a working theological framework. The creeds, the confessions, sermons we listen to and books we might read are not impositions upon Scripture, but windows into it: they attune us to the message of the Bible, help us understand what we are seeing, train our eyes to see things that we’d miss if we came to the Bible not knowing anything. Like all of life, good exegesis involves both pre-existing knowledge and skills. The frameworks that theology offer to exegesis are not impositions that warp exegesis, but empowerment that keep exegesis from constantly reinventing the first baby steps in the knowledge of God as we all blunder around, not really sure what the Bible’s message is or what it is we’re looking at.
As I look at today’s church and what I think of as the ‘core Sola Panel’ circle of readers, the last thing I think we’re in danger of is theologizing on the basis of a framework that is not driven by exegesis. Our bigger danger is to do exegesis with a fundamental suspicion of theology—to see theology as, at best, a necessary evil. Such a view means we are constantly in danger of reading the Bible with no commitment to knowing God or to knowing ourselves in light of our knowledge of God. The Bible is given, not so we can answer questions on “What is the meaning of Luke chapter 11?” but so that we can know God, know ourselves, and live rightly in light of that twofold knowledge. That’s theology. Without theology, exegesis is nothing more than an exercise in looking in the mirror and then forgetting what one looks like when one walks way.
Theology that does not arise out of exegesis of Scripture is unbelief. So is exegesis of Scripture that is not done in the service of theology and under the guidance of theology. And my observation is that we are far more in danger of the latter than the former.
Yes, theology offers frameworks for exegesis. And yes, those frameworks are not simply derived from exegesis. But I disagree that those frameworks are therefore imposed upon the Bible. Let me offer a couple of examples:
- Why do I read Scripture as a single work—66 books that are referred to as a single book, ‘the Bible’? That’s a framework that profoundly shapes my exegesis. Has it been imposed? Can exegesis on its own somehow show me that all these 66 books and no others should be treated as a single meta-literary item?
- Why do I read Scripture as though it is Scripture? Exegesis cannot establish this. Just because Scripture claims to be Scripture and presents itself as being Scripture doesn’t make it so. To treat it as Scripture is a framework that cannot be derived simply by exegesis—but is that framework imposed?
- Why do I read Scripture as though it does not contradict itself? Even if it is a single work and is Scripture, how could exegesis ever establish that a work as complex as Scripture does not fundamentally contradict itself at any point? That’s a framework that shapes exegesis, and cannot be simply derived by exegesis. But is it imposed upon Scripture?
- Or take Goldsworthy’s biblical theology framework. You can’t simply derive that from exegesis. But is it imposed? Does it fundamentally warp our ability to read the Bible, or does it basically help us read it better than if we just treated the Bible as a collection of writings with no central plot line that governs how we read them?
There are options for theological frameworks beyond ‘derived from exegesis’ and ‘imposed on’. By and large, theological frameworks are simply recognition statements: “This Scripture doesn’t just claim to be the word of God; it doesn’t just act as though it is the word of God”, *smacks head*, “By Gum!!! It really is the word of God! Boy, that’s going to change how I read it …”
As a human being, we have to have frameworks. We read the Bible as human beings with a framework of rationality already in place. That rationality was developed through long efforts by adults who brought us into some kind of adult rationality as we grow up. That’s not a bug that tragically cuts us off from hearing God; it is a feature that the Bible presupposes when it speaks to us in human language and uses human rationality in its arguments, commands, rebukes and teaching. It draws upon our rationality to communicate with us even as it rebukes and corrects that rationality in light of the knowledge of God.
As Christians, we have to have frameworks. We are brought into the household of God by believers who teach us a framework for understanding what the Bible says (not least by bringing all 66 books into a single meta-book). Sola scriptura does not mean tabula rasa (blank slate)—as though the best Bible reader would know nothing and have no preconceived ideas.
I suspect that the contemporary obsession about theology’s frameworks being imposed upon the Bible among modern evangelicals (I say that because I’ve heard the kind of complaint captured so well in this point so often that it’s now a pleasant surprise to hear someone demur from it) is not an expression of some great commitment to Scripture’s authority that has blossomed because we take the Bible so much more seriously than our spiritual forefathers did who did all that bad theologizing stuff. I think it is a sign of our cultural captivity and how much a rampant individualism has hold of us.
Like our society at large, we don’t want to have to stand on the shoulders of those who went before us; we want to pretend that they are all dispensable: it’s just me and God. “I did it my way” is our view of how we relate to God; it’s just that we co-opt the Bible to justify it: “I relate to God without imposing a framework, but as I see what the Bible says”.
Like our society at large, we have lost confidence that ‘Truth’ can be known, and content ourselves with just knowing truths. So we ask, “What does Paul say about this?” and we ask “What does Isaiah say about this?”, but we are suspicious of anyone who says, “This is what God says as a whole about this, and you should read the particulars accordingly”. Our practice might be exegesis of a collection of human authors, but it’s not exegesis of the one word of God. Exegesis of the word of God requires us to compare text with text, and think about the implications of what is being said to come up with a single, consistent answer. And that’s a theological framework—a framework that serves exegesis, not imposing itself upon it.
So it’s not either/or. Theology is derived from exegesis and creates frameworks for exegesis. And that’s a good thing.
Apologies! Comments weren’t meant to be set to ‘closed’ on this blog post.
Otherwise, I agree with much of what you have to say. My point was not that all theologising results in eisegesis but that some does, and that it is particularly apparent when it comes to questions of divine impassibility (so your initial summary of my point as claiming only two possibilities ignores the opening condition of my words as you’ve quoted them). The whole issue is somewhat more complex than I made out in that one short paragraph and even more complex than you’ve allowed for in your response. Yes, a framework is necessary to interpretation in order to resolve ambiguities in a specific direction, and in part that framework is derived from reference to Scripture as a whole. Aspects of this complexity can be identified even if not fully explicated in a “brief” comment like this:
Consequently, the framework must constantly be examined and questioned. Interpreting passible language about God as impassible is, I think, a sufficiently serious semantic inversion that it ought to prompt us to re-examine the framework even if we ultimately conclude that it is appropriate to apply special rules to such God-language. In this instance, my impression is that too much is lost in such re-interpretation of the terms, that it requires too great a semantic inversion of the terminology, and that the presuppositions inherent in the requirement that God be impassible in an absolute sense are themselves neither derived from the Bible nor from the historical contexts out of which the various biblical texts pertinent to the discussion arose. Hence I maintain that the doctrine of impassibility as expounded in your original posts is ill conceived.
Mark, Martin,
Thanks for an interesting discussion, and I look forward to more from both of you on theological method. I wonder if I might pose a (somewhat long I admit) clarifying question on impassibility first though?
It was my understanding (primarily from Gerald Bray I think) that the classical understanding of impassibility is as a concept related to the nature of God. Or as Dr Bray would put it (I can hear him now in my head), “God’s whatness.” God’s impassibility guarantees and under-girds, as Mark has noted, God’s independence from creation. For this reason, Biblical Christianity can’t do without it as a concept, because pantheism and pan-entheism cease to be Biblical and cease to be Christian.
However, again as I understand the classical statements of the doctrine (Augustine, Aquinas), they do not try to relate impassibility to the inter-personal relations of the Father, Son and Spirit (“God in his whoness”). Nor is impassibility something that dictates how God will relate to us. So I would have thought that the Biblical data of God in trinity, and in his relationship towards us has no bearing on the doctrine of divine impassibility at all.
Therefore I would have thought, and this is my clarifying question, that Martin’s comments like this one:
suffer from a category error. Is the doctrine of God’s impassibility, relating as it does to the nature of God rather than the persons of God, unaffected by the texts about which Martin comments?
Surely Mark is right to point out that it is God’s aseity that theologically underpins his free love for creation. Since if he was, in his nature, dependent on it in any way, then he would not be free to love it or not. This can’t be undone by any amount of Biblical texts that talk about God being moved in love or compassion towards us.
Hi guys,
Forgive my ignorance, but what does aseity mean? While I’ve got a diploma in theology, a lot of people who read this site don’t, so there’s a fair chance that words like homoousious) will go over a lot of people’s heads.
Mark,
Thanks for this post. Best blog-post I’ve read all year.
Martin, what do you mean by ‘serious semantic inversion of the terminology’? Can you give an example of such an inversion?
Shouldn’t the the metaphysical biblical data control the anthropomorphic biblical data, and not vice versa?
Not that I think that passible language about God should be interpreted *as* impassible, but rather interpreted *in the light of* the impassible language (which is a species of immutable language). As I understand it, that’s what John Calvin would have referred to God’s accommodation to us.
Blessings all. Thankful for the sharpening discussion.
Mark Earngey
Special thanks to Karen for making comments possible on the post, and for getting up Martin’s comment that originally he wasn’t able to make.
Mark and Nathan, you are both welcome for the post/my part of the discussion with Martin. Both your questions seem more directed at Martin, and my footprint in this discussion is already large as I get to write the formal posts for the blog, so I’ll leave it to him to interact as he sees fit unless there’s a particular bit you’d particularly like me to engage with.
Hi Roger,
Apologies for dropping into theolog-speak. I suspected I was pushing the envelope a little by using homoousious, but I’ve been hanging out with Athanasius for some time now – that word has almost become part of my normal vocabulary. (Jennie vetoed calling our child homoousious.)
homoousious – a Greek term, usually translated as something like “of the same being”. The basic idea is that the two things so compared share the same essence or nature.
aseity – a Latin term,it means to have one’s existence derived from oneself – to be self-existent, not derived from (and hence not dependent on) anything else. Hence, to be completely independent from everything else.
Hi Nathan,
I’m no expert on classical expressions of the doctrine of impassibility. I would include in the biblical data regarding God’s relating to us his anger, grief, and love. I understand these ideas to be precisely those which are central to discussions of impassibility, but perhaps I’ve misunderstood?
Does passibility necessarily entail dependence? That appears to be the presupposition underlying the logic here. Is God greater if he is not grieved by his creation? Is God greater if he is not angered by his creatures? It seems that the presumption that dependence and passibility must be tied together leads to the problem where numerous biblical texts must be interpreted in rather counter-intuitive ways. I don’t think that this presupposition is itself biblical.
Hi Mark E.,
I mean the use of terms (such as “anger”) which are applied to God and which are essentially both responsive and passible. ISTM that if your reading of these terms is controlled by notions of impassibility then your forced to fundamentally redefine the terms so that their meaning is essentially inverted or, at the very least, substantially gutted.
I’m not convinced that this is a meaningful disjunction, in part because you’re assuming your conclusion by deciding that certain language about God is anthropomorphic but other language is not.
What “impassible language” are you referring to?
Martin,
Thanks for clarifying. I have a couple of further comments:
As I understand it, your statement is both true and false. Certainly the debate has come (through movements like Open Theism) to be about God’s personal interactions. I think historically, and in better classical expressions of the doctrine, there is a distinction between God’s person and nature, making impassibility about what God is without necessarily implying that he is free of emotions in his personal relations. Perhaps Mark can correct my understanding of this, immersed as he is in Athanasius and the other fathers now.
I can really understand your drive to make sure that the immediate and historical context of each text primarily dictates its meaning, and not an imposed philosophical/theological system. Counter-intuitive exegesis is always awkward. However, I think this is a little bit of a lost cause.
Surely no-one would argue that God asks the question “Where are you?” of Adam in Gen 3:9 because he genuinely desires to know information that was unavailable to him at the time? Yet isn’t this precisely the conclusion that a contextually and historically sensitive reading would lead us to? It is our theological (and yes, philosophical) conviction of God’s omniscience that forces us to interpret the question as rhetorical – not the (con)text of Genesis.
As far as I see, we are forced into a similar conclusion on the topic of anthropomorphism which you touched on.
Surely we must admit that the Bible utilises anthropomorphic language. The cost of deciding, as you say, that this is not a “meaninful disjunction” is to predicate physical arms, ears and eyes of God. The issue isn’t whether anthropomorphic language is utilised, (it certainly is, and often without any hints in the immediate context) but when.
To answer this question we can not turn to historico-grammatical exegesis of individual texts. The texts themselves, as you point out, leave us no hints. We must turn to our (Biblically informed, I hope) doctrine of God. It is our systematic theology that must answer in what way emotions can be predicated of God, even if this leads to, as you say, “counter-intuitive exegesis.”
Hi Martin,
I’m not sure I agree I‘ve ignored the opening conditions of your words. I don’t think I claimed that you said that all that theology was bad. I claimed that you said that some theology is good because it is derived from exegesis and some theology isn’t like that (and so, by inference, is bad) because it imposes frameworks upon exegesis. If we compare that to your first sentence:
I think we get the result that you are saying ‘not all theologising results in eisegesis but some does’ as you claim, and I don’t think I ever claimed otherwise. But that you do give only two possibilities – theology is either derived from exegesis or it imposes frameworks upon exegesis. The first is good, the latter is ‘somewhat troubling.’ So I think your original words did create the either-or framework I protested, and which we agree that neither of us is entirely happy with.
Moving on to the three significant points you state in your comment on this thread:
Absolutely agree.
And I’d say something similar for exegesis – exegesis must also remain contingent and open to revision by theology. If I get an exegetical result in one part of Scripture that contradicts what the rest of Scripture teaches I need to hold very loose to that result, until I’m confident that that is what Scripture as a whole is teaching. And I’d say, I don’t hear that said anywhere nearly strongly or often enough in these kind of exegesis-theology relationship conversations that we’re having.
I’ll leave this here and pick up your point 2 in the next comment.
I think you’ve misunderstood the significance of reading the text against its historical and cultural background. Or are you suggesting that the original audience would have understood the text to be affirming God’s ignorance when asking the question? A contextually and historically sensitive reading (fraught with difficulties though that may be) should lead us toward the meaning the author and the original audience derived from the text.
As I said previously in response to Mark B., I strongly affirm the notion that we cannot understand the Bible without reference to a whole array of information present both within and without the text. I have no problem with God’s omniscience because it is well established in Scripture. At this point theology coheres closely to the biblical evidence.
Since you’ve quoted my words I’d want to emphasise that the “meaningful disjunction” I disputed was between anthropomorphic language and “metaphysical” language (whatever that is), not between anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic language.
Nonetheless, I don’t think you’ve fully reflected complexity of this issue. The issue is how any language is used of God. Even overtly anthropological language (such as references to God’s arm, etc.) or metaphorical language cannot make sense if there is no semantic transference into its context. So “arm” does not take on any uniquely divine meaning when used in reference to God, because it is used with the same sense in other contexts (e.g. Job 22:8; 35:9; Ps 83:9 [E 83:8]; etc.). If “arm” in reference to God had no semantic transfer from other usages there would be guide in understanding the language. This, I would argue, is the relevant point when passible language is claimed to be not bear passible meaning when applied to God.
Returning to the issue of reading theologically, the issue is not whether we read the text through an interpretive grid of some sort — that is inevitable and necessary. The question is whether we’ve chosen the right grid. I’m suggesting that the grid which leads us to read passible language with an impassible meaning when it is applied to God is not the right grid.
Hi Martin,
Turning to your second substantial point:
This is where I think there’s probably some significant disagreement between us. I agree that not all questions are answered. But all questions that we need to know are answered. Questions that are not answered are questions that we do not need to know for our life and doctrine. But on the matters of life and doctrine, I would argue that, taken as a whole the Bible has neither ambiguity or (except in one or two exceptions-that-prove-the-rule cases) paradox.
I agree that at the level of particulars and details I might struggle to comfortably reconcile every part – that there’s tensions among some of the Bible’s particulars. And I don’t like systems of thought that eliminate those tensions points rather than bluntly say – ‘that bit doesn’t fit easily with what the rest of the Bible is saying’.
But to say, in answer to the question: ‘Does God determine what happens or can human beings thwart God’s plans?’, that the Bible as a whole leaves us with two irreconcilable answers – that God does determine what happens, and that he does not determine what happens, is to remove God as an object of human knowledge. I cannot know something that can both be true and false in the same sense at the same time. If that’s ‘true’ of the Bible’s teaching it is a kind of ‘truth’ that really does make the words entirely non-perspicuous.
Without this the Bible cannot function as a tool for the Lordship of Christ to be exercised over his Church. If it is ambiguous and brutally paradoxical on the things that matter to faith and life then that is just another way of saying that it contradicts itself. And something that is self-contradictory cannot govern human life. At best it can sit there passively as we pick and choose which of the two or more ambiguous and paradoxical strands of the Bible’s teaching we are going to back.
This is precisely why I say that exegesis done in the service of theology is the only way to do it as an act of faith and not of unbelief. To refuse to ‘smooth’ the texts at the interpretive and synthesis stage just means that you have to do it at the point when you need to believe and act. If Scripture sounds with an ambiguous and paradoxical trumpet call it cannot give us our marching orders. We have to pick the orders we think look good in our eyes.
A Bible whose teaching is ambiguous and paradoxical is a Godsend for people with a penchant for Biblical Studies. Exegesis can go on for ever, new interpretations can be generated, and it’s all very stimulating. Every part of the Bible can be read and its difference from every other part can be stressed and the interpretative community can keep contesting rival interpretations of the parts. The conversation never ends. But this freedom for Biblical Studies comes at a cost. It takes the Bible out of the Church. The Church can no longer turn to the Bible to receive light on its path. Only exegetes can read the Bible. And they can only offer insight into the bit that they are reading at the moment. And they have to endlessly defer offering much in the way of saying why it might matter to the contemporary Christian.
I’ll turn to the final of your important points in my next comment.
G’day Martin,
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
I think my reply would go in a similar direction to Nathan’s above, but I won’t rabbit his points (they’re likely better than I could do anyway!).
You write:
I’m not convinced that this is a meaningful disjunction, in part because you’re assuming your conclusion by deciding that certain language about God is anthropomorphic but other language is not.
And Nathan writes:
Surely we must admit that the Bible utilises anthropomorphic language. The cost of deciding, as you say, that this is not a “meaninful disjunction” is to predicate physical arms, ears and eyes of God. The issue isn’t whether anthropomorphic language is utilised, (it certainly is, and often without any hints in the immediate context) but when.
To continue: is God literally a rock? A tower? Does He literally repent? Regret? Change His mind? Get surprised?
The first two would undercut His incorporeality (spiritually). The last four would undercut His exhaustive foreknowledge. Obviously we cannot go this way as the Open Theists do.
Given God’s timeless eternity and immutability (1 Sam. 15:29, Ps. 102:27, Mal. 3:6, Heb. 1:-12, James 1:17 just to name a few!), then He cannot change by emotions. Texts which imply as much need to be read in the light of the forementioned doctrines. Thus, so-called ‘passable’ language needs to be controlled by the prior commitments found in our doctrine of God.
Why does God include this language in Scripture? Again, I think Calvin’s understanding of ‘Accommodation’ is helpful here.
Gee, three replies all whilst I was typing mine! A hot topic indeed.
Martin, feel free to not to reply to mine post if you wish. I think these comments are converging into your conversation with Mark B.
Blessings,
Mark
PS – the Hebrews reference was meant to be Heb. 1:10-12.
Hi Martin,
Taking up your third big point:
I agree that it is necessary to read Biblical texts in light of the audience’s context. I’m not sure I am entirely comfortable with saying ‘Appeal to the audience’s context is thus necessary to derive the true meaning of the text’ – but that depends a bit on what the various terms in that sentence mean. My concern has to do with biblical theology and such matters, and whether texts can mean more than what the original audience could see, so probably can be passed over.
More significantly, I just disagree with your first sentence as a good statement of the problem:
Sure, there has been, no contest. But that’s not The Problem. The problem is that people haven’t submitted to the Bible’s teaching. Sometimes that’s deliberate, sometimes it’s a mistake. And there’s lots of reasons for that. Often it happens because people have overstressed what a couple of passages appear to be saying in such a way that it overturns the message of the Bible as a whole.
And in the modern context, I think you are warning us of the danger from the wrong side. We’re looking one way and we should be looking the other.
Theology and Biblical Studies are, by and large, fairly estranged these days. Biblical scholars demand the right to pursue their discipline non-confessionally and to just read the texts with no necessary coherence. Theology, by and large, ignores Biblical Studies and tries to get on with promoting the knowledge of God without the Bible. It might be Barth trying to derive all theology from the Lord Jesus Christ, Torrance trying to derive it from the Trinity, Gunton trying to do careful readings of historical theology, or confessional evangelicals taking their Westminster Confession, their Anglican tradition, the writings of Luther etc and using that as the engine room for theologising.
It’s all due to the same problem. Good, non-liberal, theologians still want to say something for the Church that is a genuine attempt at doing theology. But Biblical Studies have whisked the Bible away so it can no longer be used to promote the knowledge of God.
Biblical studies wants to be a creative, ever-changing discipline, whose findings do not have to pay attention to doctrine and so are always in flux. So the findings of exegesis this decade will probably only have the support of a minority of scholars and will be considered a bit passe in a couple of decades. Commentaries now have to be simply huge, with enormous bibliographies to be considered a serious attempt to read the book of the Bible in question. No-one is allowed to appeal to a text unless they are on top of the start of the art in the scholarship on that book.
So theology has to try and keep on top of the rapidly changing scene of biblical scholarship for all 66 books. Whichever interpretive option currently allowed by biblical scholars a theologian adopts will only be considered right by a minority. And any theology based upon that exegesis will be considered out of date relatively quickly.
So what do we get? The tragic and wrong-headed attempts by theologians over the last century since Barth to cut the Gordian knot of biblical studies and find some other basis to offer the Church the knowledge of God. Bad unbiblical theologies that at least tried to say something constructive to God’s people, which looks good when compared to how exegetes contented themselves with just offering readings of the texts to each other during the same period. And all the time, we are told, the real danger is imposing theology on the Bible. And the solution is to free exegetes from the discipline of theology – from the discipline of reading the Bible as the Word of God to his people. I think we have the diagnosis too one-sided and the solution makes our problem worse.
Just a note of interest: there is an exciting new movement spearheaded by evangelical Kevin Vanhoozer among others to bring back a ‘Theological Interpretation of Scripture’- namely, to wrest the bible back from Biblical Studies! Hooray!
Thanks Mark for this helpful discussion. Method questions are important ones and while in some hands they can be preoccupations which keep us from ever dealing with the substance of theology, they are question which we too often ignore. So again, thanks for the thoughtful presentation of a very cogent argument.
As for the movement towards a ‘theological exegesis’ or a ‘theological interpretation’ of the Bible, which Michael mentions, it might be helpful to recognise this movement has a much longer pedigree than simply Vanhoozer (though he is one more the recent contributors to the discussion who has helped to introduce it to evangelical readers). Some of the earlier contributors include Charles Wood (1981) Werner Jeanrond (1988), Francis Watson (1994), Stephen Fowl (1997) etc. It has often been argued that Karl Barth’s Romans commentary (1919/21) is an early example of such theological exegesis and that what this modern ‘movement’ (for want of a better term) is trying to do is recover the way the bulk of Christian scholars have treated the Bible over the past two thousand years. Not all who write in this area have evangelical convictions, but each of them wants to emphasise that there is more to biblical exegesis than simply a literary analysis or even a literary appreciation. The Bible refers beyond itself to the living God himself.
Hi Mark B.,
Clearly everyone’s been busy and I may not have the opportunity to respond to all the new comments that have appeared on the thread.
Your example here illustrates where there remains ambiguity and paradox. Does God determine every event down to the finest detail, or does he allow some degree of freedom for human choice between specific fixed and necessary points in history? Your presentation of the problem as “either/or” limits the possibilities and reduces the ambiguities too quickly. It is clear that the Bible does not allow for the possibility that “human beings thwart God’s plans,” but excluding that does not reduce the number of possible means by which God interacts with his creation to one. Hence you move too quickly to dismiss ambiguities in this example.
Does Pharaoh choose freely to ignore the signs and harden his heart, or is Pharaoh’s heart hardened by God? The text indicates that both are true. How is this reconciled? How is it that Job is underserving of his suffering yet he suffers? Why does he suffer?
Furthermore, to borrow the logic employed in discussions of impassibility, perhaps when the Bible speaks of God determining events, because it is speaking about God we should not presume that the words mean what they otherwise mean when applied to human beings. Consequently we arrive at an entirely non-perspicuous Bible once again!
You seem too fond of extremes: either the Bible is entirely ambiguous and “brutally paradoxical” or else it is perfectly unambiguous and contains no hint of paradox. However, if it does not tell us everything then we should not be surprised to find that we cannot completely reconcile some of the information we do have. (If we are to learn anything from Job it ought to be this!)
I am not saying that everything is entirely ambiguous. I am not saying everything is irredeemably paradoxical. Yet even in the clarity and certitude of much of what Scripture says there are still areas where all the details are not revealed to us and so those details remain somewhat ambiguous. In most cases the ambiguity has little to no bearing on the substantive points of doctrine: we’re told what we need to know, not what we want to know.
How does this apply to the impassibility of God? Certainly there are many passages which use passible language of God. But further than this, I believe most of the texts used to justify an extreme form of impassibility are either taken out of context or not well understood by those who employ them as proof texts. I also think the underlying logic employed to arrive at the belief in the necessity of impassibility (in its most extreme sense when applied to language like “grieve” or “anger”) is itself neither derived from the Bible nor necessarily biblical.
Hi Mark E.,
See my response above, in particular:
Hence “rock” and “tower” operate in a particular but consistent way when used metaphorically in language regardless of whether applied to God or people. That cannot be said for the other language which not only bears a special meaning when applied to God, but moreover is said to convey a quite dissimilar to its normal usage.
I agree that Open Theism is not the right way to go here. But I don’t agree with your claim that the last four would necessarily undermine God’s foreknowledge. There are passages in the Bible which make it clear that God’s foreknowledge goes beyond knowing what will happen, it encompasses knowing the outcomes of choices unmade. I think there are other possible ways to understand this type of language and incorporate notions of divine sovereignty and understand the biblical material than eschewing any substantive meaning from the language.
Here is where I’m unconvinced by conventional appeals to these texts in this debate. Take Mal 3:6 as an example. It goes beyond this text to claim that God is impassible because what is on view in Mal 3 is God’s faithfulness. The people of Judah are not consumed because God’s faithfulness toward his people, his love for them, does not change. To take that (and the other texts) and extrapolating to a doctrine of absolute impassibility goes beyond what the texts actually say.
Hi Martin,
Yars, looks like you’ve got at least three people wanting to pursue somewhat different lines of conversation with you on this thread. Usually by this stage when I’m in your shoes I start triaging my responses, so I won’t be at all offended if your interactions with me drop back.
It is possible that we are speaking at cross-purposes here. I’m not sure what you mean by the terms ‘ambiguities’ and ‘paradoxes’.
You say that there are ‘paradoxes’ and ‘ambiguities’ in the Bible to do with the nature of God’s sovereignty and the ability of events to unfold without God determining them. And yet, in your responses to me regarding Pharaoh, and Job’s suffering you give the impression that you have a model that you think is a pretty good fit for the biblical data.
When Mark Earngey said,
You replied:
None of this looks as though you think the Bible’s teaching on the matter is either ambiguous or paradoxical in the sense that I would use those words. You present as though you have a model in mind that you think explains the data better than traditional Reformed or free-will accounts or those given by Open Theism.
Ambiguous would be if you say: “weeelll, it’s fairly hard to get a handle on what the Bible thinks about whether God determines events, there’s stuff that could be taken to justify any position and no model can explain the data all that well.”
Paradoxical would be if you say: “The Bible’s teaching is pretty clear about Job’s suffering – Job is entirely to blame for his suffering. And Job is not in any way the cause of his suffering. It’s clear that’s what the Bible says, but I just can’t see how both of those things can be true in the same way at the same time.” *Shrugs* “But that’s what the Bible says. It’s a paradox.”
The comments you’ve made give the impression that you’ve built a better mouse-trap when it comes to these issues. That’d be an interesting discussion when we’ve finished catching all the rabbits we’ve let lose already. But a better explanation is, itself, a rejection of substantial ambiguity and paradox in the Bible on these matters, at least insofar as I use those words.
Hi Martin,
Picking up the rest of your comment:
This is what I wrote on the same topic:
I read it that you and I are saying more or less the same thing in the quoted sections here. We’re emphasising different aspects, we’re using different words, and we have the points in a different order.
But we’re both saying:
The Bible has some parts that are ambiguous
The Bible is clear on the questions we need to know the answers
I did not contrast entirely ambiguous and paradoxical with “perfectly unambiguous and contains no hint of paradox”. I said there are ambiguities and a couple of paradoxes that don’t set any precedents, but that the Bible is fundamentally clear on the questions we need answers to. I contrasted that with a view of the Bible where it is not fundamentally clear but is fundamentally (not entirely) ambiguous and brutally paradoxical even on the questions we need answers on. And that “extreme” contrast seems to me to be the same as the one you’ve also proposed in the words I’ve quoted.
Possibly we need to move to some particular examples to work out if we are on the same page.
Here’s some examples of where I think the Bible is ambiguous:
Baptism for the dead.
Who did Adam and Eve’s children marry?
Who were the sons of God who married the daughters of men?
Could God have created people in his image with either no gender or more than three genders? (That’s a doozy, mainstream theology doesn’t like restricting God’s ability to do things any more than is utterly necessary to avoid logical paradoxes (and some guys don’t even accept that limitation), but two genders is fundamental to reproduction, relationships, even to our union with Christ (marriage is a pattern of Christ and the Church) so it would change everything out of all recognition. So what’s the answer? No idea, we don’t need to know such a weird hypothetical.)
Will we be male and female in heaven? Will children be born in heaven? Will there be authority-submission relationships in heaven? Will we have access to unlimited resources or limited resources in heaven?
Why did the angels fall? Do angels continue to fall? If not, why not?
How could God test Abraham’s faith by commanding the sacrifice of Isaac without that also being a command to sin?
Those are the kinds of things that I think are ambiguous and pushing the question too far, based on what the Bible says, might possibly give a paradox-induced headache.
Is this the kind of thing that is in that category for you, or is it things that touch closer to home on matters relating to life and doctrine?
Hi guys,
I’ll drop out after this and just listen with awe to the conversation (too much else to do I’m afraid). However, I wonder whether some of the problem comes from the use of language like ‘ambiguity’. Mark, I’m not sure that’s quite the right word for some of the examples you cite. Is the Bible really ambiguous on baptism for the dead? It mentions it but doesn’t provide an explanation so we are left to guess what is meant (though presumably the first readers knew quite well what was meant). That’s not quite the same as being ambiguous, is it? On the spouses of Adam and Eve’s children there seems to be silence rather than ambiguity, doesn’t there?
Perhaps we need to be a bit more precise in what we are talking about.
What I would be very keen to do is avoid an unhelpful antithesis or even antipathy between biblical studies and systematic theology. As you’ve amply shown, both are necessary. Systematicians need to be kept honest by biblical studies asking whether what we are saying is actually supported by the text. Biblical scholars need to be reminded from time to time that the goal of our study is not just to know this text better but to advance in our understanding of the God who inspired the text.
Hi Mark,
Good to have your and Michael’s input.
You could be right about the ambiguity issue. I suppose my instinct is that most ambiguity is caused by silence but by a ‘partial’ silence – where hints or mentions of something are are so minimal that one can’t get a clear picture of what it is, even though Scripture has gestured to it. I can see something is there, but it’s hidden in a fog so I can’t grasp it.
If Scripture speaks relatively expansively about something and yet I can’t seem to make the bits add up without getting tangled up in absurdities then that’s ‘paradox’. I can see clearly what Scripture is pointing at but what is being pointed at seems to involve serious internal contradictions at some level. So for me, ambiguity and paradox are related – neither be resolved into a clear object of knowledge, one because there’s not enough information to make sense of the hints, one because the information is there but it doesn’t cohere in the way objects of knowledge need to for human minds to grasp them.
When I say Scripture is ‘silent’ about something that’s almost a positive category for me. Scripture is silent about who I should marry, what kind of government a country should have etc – kind of thing that Tony Payne blogged on a while back. That probably doesn’t exhaust the category for me, but it does sort of capture the heart of it – where Scripture is silent then a Christian’s conscience is not bound by the Word of God in what it should believe or do.
So I agree with you the Bible is silent about who Adam and Eve’s children married and what baptism for the dead is, but I think that’s what makes it ambiguous – they clearly married someone, and none of the options I can put forward (other human beings were created, or they married their siblings) seem great, and the lack of info about baptism for the dead does then create a certain degree of ambiguity if it is asked, “Can we do baptisms for the dead as Christians?”
Are you suggesting that something more like a three category system might work better because that would be more precise? ambiguity, paradox, and silence? What do you think might be the danger in collapsing ambiguity and silence together?
And I fully agree about the need for genuine partnership between biblical studies and theology. After all…some of my best friends are in biblical studies.
Hi Mark B.,
I think I’m falling further behind here…
Once again it seems you’re painting a picture in black and white while ignoring the many shades of grey. You identify the “good, non-liberal, theologians,” but nonetheless happily lump all biblical scholars together in order to attribute to the entire group the responsibility for the failure of theologians. But I’m not convinced that this is fair! I’m pretty sure that there’d be bad theologians even if biblical studies presented a united front. Neither biblical studies nor theology can be fairly represented via generalisations like these (should we confer upon all theologians criticisms derived from an assessment of liberation theology?). We all have to pick and choose, and if you’re looking for sound exegetical biblical scholarship with which to interact then some sifting is going to be necessary — and that much is not a new phenomenon!
Anyway, my complaint was not with the use of any framework in interpreting the Bible (for some framework is necessary), but with the use of an “inappropriate extra-Biblical” framework (by which I don’t mean that any extra-Biblical input is inappropriate, but that some such influences are inappropriate, and I’d want to qualify that the framework would also have to be biblically informed in addition to the external information).
Anyway, on to matters raised more recently.
Where is there paradox and ambiguity? I think there’s an apparent paradox, for example, in the Bible’s teaching on the Trinity. I say “paradox” because it appears that one God but three persons is (at least superficially) inconsistent. However, I also say “apparent” because I don’t think we have sufficiently exhaustive knowledge to be able to claim that this is a true paradox. Now I’m aware that there are extensive debates about the nature of the Trinity and attempts to clarify the nature of God using terms like “substance/being” and “person” but I’m also aware that these debates are constantly in danger of going beyond Scripture in attempting to delineate the nature of God more precisely or in a manner not specifically supported by the biblical data. That’s not to say they’re necessarily wrong in what they say, they may present a model entirely consistent with Scripture, but which is more specific in its details that Scripture is itself.
Similarly, I think there’s an apparent paradox in compatibilism, but again that we do not have a sufficiently comprehensive knowledge of the operations of God’s sovereignty to be able to definitively declare the biblical presentation of divine sovereignty and free will to be inconsistent. My suggestions above were in regards this topic were intended to indicate that there may be more than one way to read the biblical evidence and so warn against too quickly settling on one particular interpretation as being correct. While the data excludes many theories, in these instances a theory which itself accurately reflects the data must contain some uncertainties. For this knowledge, “God understands the way to it, and he alone knows where it dwells…” (Job 28).
Ambiguity, OTOH, arises in questions such as whether we should practice baptism for the dead. Or is King Hiram being sarcastic in 1Kings 5:7? There’s a great deal that needs to be said with regards ambiguity in communication and how disambiguation occurs which is relevant to biblical hermeneutics, but I’m afraid that is a book, not a blog comment.
The problem with insisting that paradox and ambiguity go away is that it can result in a conclusion more precise than that actually found in the Bible.
heya Martin,
Heh. I think the shoe’s on the other foot. As I read this I have five comments addressed to me to respond to. However, I suspect anyone following this debate in the comments is going to be more interested in the quality of our arguments than the speed of the response.
Glad to hear it. I was being outrageously unfair. I tried to write that little story of a tale of two biblical disciplines as one-eyed as I could push myself to be. Nice, simple good guys and bad guys. In fact, I’m a bit disappointed that you were the only person to call me on it. I tried to write a description of what has happened that exonerated theology and blamed biblical studies as completely and unfairly as evangelicals usually tell it in the reverse – of rescuing biblical studies from the control of theology that is just itching to go racing off and leave the Bible behind. I kept the story, but got the main characters to swap their white and black hats (had some trouble with the union, but we got there). I agree with how you have qualified the story. My version was intended just to reflect back how the story is typically told in reverse.
I agree with the basic gist of how you are classifying paradox and ambiguity. I don’t like your two examples – the Trinity and compatibilism. With the Trinity, my sticking point is:
I am happy to say that about various post-Chalcedon developments (not all, but some) but not to the basic positions in Nicea and Chalcedon as expounded by Athanasius, the Cappadocians and even Augustine. I might contest aspects of individual positions here and there, but I think they are basically just stating the teaching of the Bible – both explicit statements and positions that need to be held as a consequence of those statements. If that isn’t the case, we need to adjust the thirty-nine articles to remove any reference to those two creeds. Something cannot hold the conscience of a Christian if it goes beyond Scripture.
With compatibilism my issue is the wording:
I’d also say that it appears paradoxical but that careful attention to the issue removes most of the ambiguity. But to say that we don’t have sufficient knowledge to definitively declare the presentation to be inconsistent suggests that we enough to provisionally declare it to be so – i.e. that it’s probably wrong, but we can’t quite prove that conclusively. I’m not there.
But I think we agree on what the concepts of paradox and ambiguity involve from this ‘show and tell’ session. Does it seem that way to you?
Again, the debate seems to be about:
and
As written, I agree. As I’ve said, at the level of talking in the abstract we both agree that the Bible is not fundamentally ambiguous and paradoxical but does contain some paradoxes and ambiguities. So, for me, it depends just how far off ‘minimal paradoxes and ambiguities’ you want to push the slide.
I think the level of ambiguity and paradox in the Bible is only one or two notches above ‘none.’ We can’t know how God’s will and our free decisions work together but we can know that they do and even see some reasons that might explain why. I get the impression that for you it’s a number of notches further away from ‘none’ than that, so that on some (many?) important questions we cannot give a simple answer as to the basic gist of the Bible’s teaching – a fair bit of uncertainty has to be included in the ‘theory’ itself, which means it has to be a moderately complex position, at a minimum.
I’ve been finding the passibility/impassibility discussion on Sola Panel interesting. I think Martin has made some good points, which I don’t think have been satisfactorily dealt with. I haven’t found it easy to follow what Mark Baddeley writes and some others have used so much Latin that is not translated or defined, that I’m not sure I follow what they are saying either.
One question I have is about the incarnation and exaltation of Jesus. I understand that one of the wonderful benefits of Jesus’ incarnation and exaltation is that God became Man and that Jesus remains forever an exalted Man. He is God but he is truly human. One of the things I take from Hebrews is that we have a great high priest who is a perfect man who is interceding for us. It is nice to know that he *had* the experience of being a man like us. He suffered and was tempted like us, but he was triumphant over all this suffering and temptation. He never sinned.
But I would have thought that it is important to know that he still feels for us *now* as an exalted Man. Has he retreated from sharing truly in our experiences and become impassible again?
The more I think about it, the more this doctrine makes God to be cold and unfeeling.
I had previously accepted this teaching and thought I understood it, but now I am dithering.
David McKay
Hi David,
Your question precisely hilights a primary concern that we must keep in focus in this whole discussion:
Jesus doesn’t cease to be God when he becomes man. That is to say, (as confusing as this is going to sound) if God is impassible, then Jesus as the second person of the trinity was and remains impassible also.
The cost of denying this is far too great – we end up with Jesus shedding his Godhood when he becomes man, in which case he can not save us. The book of Hebrews is equally concerned that Jesus is truly God, as truly man.
Rather than thinking of the incarnation as a “shedding” of divinity (or to use the Greek—not Latin—term, kenoticism), we should think of it as a “taking on” of humanity. The divine word adds a human nature to his divine nature.
The picture that we should have of God is of three persons (who) sharing one nature (what). The second of those persons has a second nature (what) but remains one person (who).
Therefore in his human nature, Christ is passible, but in his divine nature, Christ is impassible. This is precisely as logically coherent as it is for one person to exist in two natures. Just like we say that on the cross the second person of the trinity dies in his human nature, but his divine nature can not die.
And this has been the point that I am trying to make on this thread, and on the next one. Passibility and impassibility are something that relate to nature (what God is), not to person (who God is).
This is also what stops the doctrine of impassibility from descending into a “cold and unfeeling” God, as you put it. God relates to us personally, not in a “cold and unfeeling” way. However, at the same time we can insist on his utter independence from us and our complete inability to prevent God from being God. No matter what we do, we can not influence, change or coerce God.
The cost of giving up impassibility is also far too great. We end up uncertain of God’s faithfulness, since—who knows—maybe somewhere down the track someone will convince or coerce God into doing something he doesn’t want to do.
Nathan, you haven’t said if Jesus is still passible. I understand he is still a Man. Is he still one who shares our feelings?
And I’m not convinced that it is a good thing for God to not have any feelings, yet say that he does!
The Scriptures tell us that he can be hurt, that he gets angry, that he [the Holy Spirit] can be grieved. How can this be if he has no feelings?
Hi Nathan, David,
I’d argue that this is only a valid representation of an extreme passibility which is then countered by an extreme impassibility. I don’t think that a God who is angered by our sin or grieves over our faithlessness is necessarily open to such coercion or manipulation.
OTOH, the cost of adopting the extreme impassibility that Mark B. has affirmed lies in a loss of perspicuity in any language about God. In other words, impassibility (as evidenced to some degree by the discussion at hand) readily constructs a logical framework which ultimately fails to adequately deal with the biblical data (or at least I’m waiting to see it so dealt with).
I think it remains possible to believe that God reacts (and is thus passible although not in the most extreme sense) and yet always does so in a manner consistent with his unchanging justice and love, who thus cannot be manipulated or coerced.
David,
I think I have. Jesus’ human nature is, like ours, passible. He is still a man, therefore he is still passible in his humanity.
Jesus divine nature is, as with the Father, impassible. He is, and never ceased to be, divine, and so he is, and never ceased to be, impassible in his divinity.
Passibility is language that should be applied to what God is, not who God is. And therefore doesn’t really relate to the question of whether God has feelings.
(Of course this is a different theological construction to what both Mark and Martin are saying.)
Martin,
Firstly, you can’t have extreme im/passibility. It’s like pregnancy. You’re either passible or you’re not.
Secondly, I don’t think that the reformed definition of impassibility says anything about whether God is angry or grieved. (But this will be something that I will take up when I reply to Mark at length back over in the other thread, so I’m not going to do it here.)
My position, however, doesn’t really change the discussion you and Mark are having here. All of us (you, me and Mark) affirm that God gets angry and is grieved. The debate between you and Mark isn’t about whether he does or not, the debate is about in what sense we might affirm and understand that.
Hi David, Martin,
David,
It’s great to hear from you. I thought your questions in the second part of your first comment were just great and pushed the discussion in a very helpful direction. So, I’ve made the decision to turn your input and my interaction into the next post in this semi-series. Depending on how fast Karen can turn things around, it’ll either go up tomorrow morning or a later day.
Martin, I think that means I’ll drop your 4th point altogether, the final thing in this thing we’re doing will be your 5th point. I think the 4th one is important, but this subsequent debate has opened so many important issues we can afford to leave a couple. Given the way I argue from Scripture I’m sure there’ll be plenty of opportunities in the future to express that concern again.
David, as to the bits you begin with:
That’s good to know. Would you be up to jotting down on the thread what those good points are, and what is unsatisfactory in how I or others have responded? That kind of information could move the discusson on really well.
I’m tempted to say mea culpa at this point, but I’ve possibly used up my impishness quota already.
I appreciate the fact that I am a long way from being the easiest person to follow, and think its great that you’ve persevered nonetheless. I’ll keep trying to find ways to make things as clearly as I can.
But please feel free to quote bits of the discussion and ask people to explain what on earth is meant by that (or even check whether what you think it might be saying is what is being said). I can’t see people’s body language, so my capacity to know when I’ve bungled the communication enterprise depends on some type appearing in the thread. Other people struggling through my opaque writing, but lacking the confidence to ‘speak up,’ would probably appreciate any lifeline you can throw them.
Thanks again for joining the discussion.
Hi Nathan,
Well that all depends by what you mean when you use the words! By “extreme passibility” I refer to being passible to the point where it admits death or manipulation or coercion. Quite often “impassibility” is defined as affirming that God is incapable of dying, but I don’t want then suggest that by claiming God is passible in some sense then necessarily implies that I’m saying he can die. So this is my “extreme” and, within those parameters, I do think it makes sense.
Perhaps so, but my reading of Mark’s original post on impassibility did not make his affirmation of this apparent. Indeed, it came across as quite determinedly against the idea that God could be angered or grieved by our actions in any meaningful sense. Remember Spock and Data from Star Trek — both of whom were emotionless, did not get angry, did not grieve, etc.
Now what you’ve said may be deliberately subtle and suggest that God can be angry but not angered — he is not affected by his creation in line with Mark’s original posts. That, of course, is the point where we are forced back to arguing that God-language in the Bible is fundamentally dissimilar to all other language and hence itself somewhat opaque so that knowledge of God becomes rather uncertain.
Hi Martin,
It’s been my agenda all the way along in this discussion to disagree both with you and Mark. But mostly with Mark.
I think the way that Mark articulates the doctrine of impassibility forces him to relate it directly to the question of whether God has emotions. So you aren’t wrong to say that some formulations of this doctrine go that way. However, I think the reformed formulation of impassibility will just answer that we are talking apples and oranges.
I’m cautiously stating this though, not having read every reformed voice out there. But it is certainly true of people like Louis Berkhof, and—where I learned it in the first place—Gerald Bray.
I think that Mark is correct in his critique of your reply. I think if we go the way you want to go then we are inescapably going to be drawn into a “creaturly” (notice how I used the quotes this time
) view of God. I know you disagree with that statement. But I don’t think I can do a better job of defending it than Mark has already done.
I think the proper way to handle this doctrine is to say that anger is a personal response, and we know God’s anger because we’ve seen God get angry at us. But God in his nature is impassible. And there is a distinction (and yes, a mystery as well) there that we are going to need to hold on to.
I’ve just re-read Mark’s three posts on God being impassible.
Mark, you have hardly cited any Scripture! Your first article did not have a single biblical reference. And few of the few verses you cited are germane to your case.
You cited Irenaeus, Athanasius and the Thirty-Nine Articles, but I think you need to show more clearly that this doctrine is taught in Scripture.
James 1:17 and Romans 11:34-36 are worth pondering on this issue, but do you have any other scripture to back up this idea? I would think they would be useful as part of your arsenal, but not enough for a whole case.
Phil Johnson does a reasonable job, I think, in his article “God without mood swings” in the book Bound Only Once, which is available online at http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/articles/impassib.htm
I have to admit that the term impassible is off-putting. I think it could be expressed better by saying that God doesn’t have mood-swings, doesn’t fly into a rage, is not suddenly overcome with emotion, but is always perfectly loving, always wholly angry at sin, always completely trustworthy, always compassionate and merciful, and always completely just.
I think that a good case could be made for this from a huge stock of passages in the Old Testament which are based on Exodus 34:6-7 for God’s love, steadfastness and justice, and from the book of Nahum [and many other places]for the Bible’s teaching about God’s holy wrath.
The New Dictionary of Biblical Theology article on God points out that impassibility terminology is derived from the Greek philosophers. I think this language should be ditched for language derived from the Bible, as I have attempted above because the impassible terminology inevitably sounds cold and unfeeling, whereas to say that God is wholly loving, etc does not come across that way.
I’m not yet convinced on the idea that God is completely unmoved by us, so I haven’t tried to encompass that concept in my rewording of what I think are good points in the concept I think impassibility is intended to express.
Loved the mea culpa gag.
David,
You absolutely rock.
Ouch! My first article most certainly did have a single biblical reference! It might be sitting there forlornly and lonely, but I’m sure that 2 Cor 11:28-29 counts as Scripture.
Far more seriously, this is just a great catch, it‘s why you rock. And I think the way I’m going to blog for most of this year (at least) is going to keep raising this issue. So we’ll probably have this discussion a couple of times if people put as much thought into what they’re reading as you have. Here’s a few elements of my basic philosophy that stands behind the approach. It’s probably more than you want to know, but I don’t think I can give you any less without sounding even more silly than I will offering this much.
1. Blogs are meant to generate discussion, they aren’t meant to be ‘closed’ in the kind of way a sermon is. So I deliberately try not to cover all the bases in the hope that people will go, ‘rubbish, because of x, y, z’ or maybe ‘yes, but what about x, y, z’? It’s a metacommunication thing designed to say – ‘there’s a lot of room to take things further’. I don’t have control of the conversation that then ensues. But for me, people’s comments, and my interaction with them, and their response is easily as important as the original post.
Coming out of the original series we could have had a big discussion about the texts and what kind of God they set before us – something like your question that generated my most recent post. But instead we got Martin’s great questions which focused more on methodological issues. That’s fine, my hope is that, over time both larger methodical questions and challenges and more concrete ‘yes, but where in Scripture does it say that’ questions and challenges will be generated. Sometimes, as with the depression blog, people might even want to sharpen up the ‘pointy end’ a bit further and make the implications for life more concrete.
I’m a bit less interested in winning people to my view than getting them to take some time out and think hard about God. So Nathan stepping up and knocking something right over the bleachers the way he has in the other thread, you stepping up and rereading those three long posts, taking the time to think and then writing on the thread like this is just gold for me. I want that. I want it so much more than you or anyone quite lining up with me on impassibility. And I think we stop that when we try and cover all the bases too much up front. So I leave gaps for the reader to wrestle with, if they’re the kind of reader that does that kind of thing.
2. A lot of big theological issues aren’t derived simply from exegesis – hence my examples in the post for this thread. And impassibility is a bit like that. Almost any text an impassibilist will point to, someone like Martin can quite rightly come along and say “pfft. That doesn’t prove impassibility. So many other possibilities are out there.” Trying to then ‘prove’ it from the texts requires not just appeal to texts, but explanation of why you are taking that approach in interpreting them, some of the methodology behind that, and so forth. And that becomes an essay even more than my posts already are.
Often we just use our doctrine to help us understand the texts and deal with matters of faith and life. We don’t try and prove Goldsworthy’s biblical theology every time we use it. We don’t establish the doctrine of the Trinity (producing passages to establish the unity of God, the deity of the Father, Son and Spirit and so forth) every time we write something about what a difference it makes. We sort of take it for granted unless it gets contested.
And, *Mark says with tongue firmly in cheek,* I know that on a blog like Sola Panel with its links to Moore College and hence to historic, doctrinal Anglicanism, impassibility isn’t up for grabs. It is in the very first of the thirty-nine articles, which we believe are a trustworthy statement of Scripture’s teaching. So I can just blog on the basis of it being true because all Anglican clergy, and well taught laypeople, will of course believe it already. It’s people disagreeing with me who are going to feel the need to try and justify their position from Scripture given that we are already sure that God is impassible. Just as they would if they queried the deity of Christ. (Oh, that was fun!)
So one thing I’m doing by not running big defences is making a point. I don’t need to defend impassibility.
To be concluded…
3. I don’t like doing defensive theology when I don’t need it. There’s an important place for showing the scriptural evidence to establish the truth of doctrines. It’s really critical. We cannot function without that. But when that is the primary mode of our theologising we give the impression that doctrine is cold, lifeless, and argumentative. We win arguments, but lose hearts – something I see a lot in Internet debates. So my approach in the posts will usually be to try and declare the doctrine positively – pointing to some elements in Scripture that I think people often haven’t considered when looking at the doctrine.
As your comment to me on the most recent post shows, you’re not really going “Bzzt. Not enough evidence.” You’re going, “This God who you are talking about is someone I don’t want. And, by the way, here’s how it contradicts what I know about the Incarnation and the Trinity.” You didn’t go. “Here’s twelve texts that prove God is passible.” And that’s after I tried to show you why this doctrine matters so much. Imagine what would have happened if I had spent the time trying to establish it step by step? You probably would have been even more alienated by the end.
Conservative evangelicals keep proving that women shouldn’t teach men, and a lot of people go, “Okay, that’s what Paul said but it’s not what it means.” And I think part of the reason why they react that way is that we don’t put enough energy into showing why it is good that women submit to men in church and the family (we‘ll leave other contexts to the side for another day – this much conservative evangelicals agree on at least), and why the alternative is disastrous. And so we win arguments and (more often than we should) lose hearts. Faced with an argument that is well grounded in texts but which seems to make a nonsense of everything else people think the Bible teaches, people choose the whole over the part.
So I’m practicing doing the other thing – showing how things fit into what the Bible says as a whole.
4. Finally, for me this is (paradoxically) an issue of being committed to Scripture. Jesus ‘proves’ the resurrection in Mk 12:26 by quoting Ex 3:6 – one text and one that has nothing directly to do with the question. He ‘proves’ the disciples are in the right by eating grain on the Sabbath by appealing to David’s example of eating bread set aside for the priests – a text that has even less to do with the question.
Jesus’ example here says something powerful about how Scripture functions to rule over the people of God that I think we lose if we keep trying to ‘prove’ doctrines by separating them off by themselves, scanning the Bible for all the texts we might think can act as a proof text, assembling them, and then trying to justify our interpretation. There’s a big place for that.
But if that’s what we think is the one and only way to appeal to Scripture then I think we’re in danger of losing the kind of sense of how the Bible speaks to us that is implicit in our Lord’s example. God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Therefore there is a resurrection from the dead.
What you’re seeing is me trying out ways to try and be faithful to his example of how to submit to Scripture. “A single word can slay him” in Luther’s evocative phrase. And it’s a work in progress. When my thoughts crystalise further I’ll probably blog on it here or on my blog.
Hi David,
Picking up the other big issues you raise:
Sort of, the problem is that all those things you like aren’t what impassibility is, they are things Christians (quite rightly) like that are a consequence of impassibility. So you can’t just replace impassibility with those things, any more than you can just replace ‘propititiation’ with ‘God genuinely forgives us.’ Now, when trying to entice wary readers into accepting a view they don’t like, a smart writer will always stress the good implications rather than the weirdo framework that makes those good implications possible. But you can’t just replace the one with the other.
Part of the problem is that we see ‘passions’ and read ‘emotions’ and emotions are a good thing for us. (Hence my first post). But you can’t read ‘the passion of Christ’ and go ‘the emotion of Christ’. It’s clear that there is *ahem* little univocality between ‘passion’ and ‘emotion’ – not only does ‘passion’ include items that ‘emotion’ does not (like dying and suffering), the whole understanding of the thing is different. We go ‘love, joy, grief, anger’ – a clear set, all emotions, and leave suffering and death out. Previous eras would go ‘grief, anger, suffering, death’ – a clear set, all passions, and would leave love and joy out (certainly love I think, and, without double checking I think joy as well). So there’s overlap, but when you see what doesn’t carry over, you begin to see that just asking about emotions makes it difficult to ‘get’ the concept properly.
This is a constant important issue, and possibly worthy of a thread of its own – although I think few people could muster up the enthusiasm to follow it. My own view is that it is disastrous to do what you want (and what many evangelicals would have sympathy with, I suspect). As the early church discovered, heretics always use the same language as Scripture, will quote Scripture, and will sign virtually any doctrinal statement if the doctrine statement only uses Scriptural language in it. They define the terms their way, and then happily move on.
And so the preacher or “church’s” role is not just to read Scripture in public, is not even just to pull bits of Scripture together into a pastiche. It is to expound and explain Scripture. It is to find forms of words, to use the pre-existing categories of thought, and existing questions and concerns as tools – all under the authority and in submission to Scripture – to explain the meaning of Scripture to people. So the early stages of the Church’s reflection and preaching draws on Greek thought because in the providence of God, that was the cradle. But if you read the writers of the period, they were no fans of philosophy. They hated philosophy quite often. But they were determined to speak meaningfully to the people of their day. And so they do use pre-existing terms and speak to pre-existing debates. But they do so on their terms – on what Scripture authorises, and, in the process often reframe existing debates in whole new ways.
So we might get things we don’t like from greek philosophy – such as impassibility terminology. But we also get things we do like – such as the idea that God created the world from nothing, and that the Son is equal to the Father and yet is of the same being as the Father, and that Christ is both fully God and fully man. All of these draw on Greek philosophical concerns and questions and categories, but, I would suggest, do so to declare Scripture’s teaching and use them as servants under the authority of the Word of God.
So I’m a ‘use all good gifts in the service of the knowledge of God’ guy (theology as the queen of the sciences), not a ‘theology must only use the language of the Bible guy’ (theology reads the Bible in a vacuum without using anything from God‘s gifts of common grace)
Thanks very much for your interesting replies to my questions, Mark.
A couple of more questions:
1. If it is true that God is unmoved by you and me [and please note the “me” – Peter O’Brien gets it, but not many others do, now], why should I be motivated to pray?
[A bit like the Arminian’s question to the Calvinist about prayer, I suppose.]
2. I don’t like the dichotomy between Jesus as passible and God as impassible. Even in his days of humility, Jesus also was surely perfectly loving, perfectly angry at sin, not subject to mood swings, etc.
You said that I like the aspect of impassibility which Phil Johnson articulated, that God is perfectly loving, wrathful, not subject to mood swings, etc.
I do like it, but I think I like it partly because I see it clearly taught in Scripture.
I should admit that I have not read many theological tomes. I find the language hard to follow. The one tome I do have is not very tomey and is easy to read, which is why I bought Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology. And he’s a naughty boy who dismisses impassibility in a couple of lines…
Do you have any recommendations for systematic theologies which are comprehensible, please?
However, over the past 5 years, I have read the Scriptures through completely 7 times. I’ve read the Scriptures alone a few times, and have also read through the Zondervan NIV Archaeological Study Bible, the ESV Reformation Study Bible and in a few days, with God’s help, I hope to complete the terrific ESV Study Bible.
Providentially Kevin DeYoung’s seminar topic on Together for the Gospel was on impassibility… “Why the Sufferings of Christ are more glorious because God does not suffer.”
Justin Taylor provides a summary of his talk and a link to his manuscript here.
David, in particular, and the rest, I wonder what you think of it…
G’day Sandy. Morning folks.
As you can see, I’m in the process of thinking this through.
I think there are positive things that the teaching about God’s impassibility gives.
It reinforces God’s transcendence and sovereignty.
It reminds us of the collection of verses where God says
I am the LORD. I don’t change.
It reinforces, as Kevin DeYoung says that God is not in a mess. He hasn’t been surprised by human actions.
It vigorously argues against the Open Theist view that God doesn’t know the future.
However, I think this teaching brushes a lot of Scripture under the carpet which is embarrassing for it.
There are huge tracts of the Old Testament which express God’s regret and grieving and anger which impassibilists seem to want to explain away as anthropopathism.
It seems to me that you need a position which takes both sets of text into account.
I would like to see how you would urge people to pray and at the same time tell them that God is a cosmic Buddha who is totally unmoved by humanity!
Those who present this viewpoint do not seem to have much Scripture to cite that supports their point of view. But they do have lots of early Church Fathers they can quote.
I think a modified form of this teaching could be shown to be biblical, but the first job is to ditch the stupid word impassible!
Kevin DeYoung’s article is the best presentation of [wash my mouth out with soap] impassibility and is well worth your time, folks. See http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevindeyoung/files/2010/04/T4G-2010-KDY-v_2.pdf
He addresses the problems which this teaching raises and even cites Scripture in support.
G’day David,
I wonder if I might be able to jump in and reflect on some of your concerns. Particularly your (right and good) concern as to why none of us are talking about the Bible very much!
I’m glad! It’s very important to be able to see what you’re going to loose before you decide to ditch a whole doctrine. And I think you’ve nailed it.
Saying that scripture is using anthropomorphic language isn’t the same thing as “brushing Scripture under the carpet.” That Scripture uses anthropomorphic language to describe God can’t be denied, or else God has arms, ears, eyes etc (eg. Deut 4:34, Ps 17:6). The question isn’t whether Scripture uses anthropomorphic language, but when? Is it right to apply anthropomorphic language to the Scripture that speaks of God’s feelings or not?
Clearly we can’t answer this question just using Scripture itself. The question isn’t about what the text is saying. Its about what it means. This is why the discussion strays so far sometimes into areas other than the Bible.
The reason no-one is quoting much Scripture isn’t because we are all doing something that isn’t based on Scripture. It’s because there isn’t much point just yet. If Mark quotes the Bible, then Martin is just going to come along and say “No it doesn’t mean that… it means this.” And I am going to come along and say that it means something different to what both of them think. We all want to be Biblical, but first we have to decide how we should apply meaning to the Biblical words.
The early church Father’s become especially useful for thinking through issues like this, because they spent their lives defending the Bible from people who wanted to use Biblical language, and Biblical quotes, to support wrong teaching.
In the end, theological argument has to move beyond just being able to find Bible verses that back up what you are saying. For example, it’s pretty easy to build a Biblical case (citing the Bible everywhere and restricting yourself to only use Biblical language) and still end up denying that Jesus is the eternal Son of God. (Arius is famous for it!)
So the church Fathers found themselves in the (very odd) position of defending Biblical teaching against the misuse of Biblical language. In order to do this, they had to move beyond biblical language. Words like “trinity” and “hypostasis” and “homoousios” started appearing in order describe different ideas that, while taught in the Bible, were not themselves mentioned in the Bible. (Hypostasis is actually a Biblical word, but you see my point anyway.)
I think the same thing has been going on in this impassibility debate. We are all trying to say what the Bible teaches. No-one is wanting to get up and argue that the Bible is wrong, or to sweep chunks of it under the rug. No-one is ignoring or unaware of the relevant Biblical teaching on the subject.
But there are some fundamental issues that we can’t overcome just by reading the Bible and not doing anything else, because we will all read the same passages and disagree on what they mean. We have to talk about what the Bible means, not just what it says.
I’m afraid I’m with Mark on this one. We don’t want to ditch the word impassible just because of how it makes God sound. The word “trinity” makes Christians sound like polytheists to a Muslim, but we don’t want to ditch that word either.
Instead we want to clarify and carefully teach what we think it means and what we think it doesn’t.
Hope that’s helpful in clarifying where we’re all coming from, and why no-one is quoting very much of the Bible. You have some very helpful specific concerns on Jesus and prayer etc. that are definitely worth interacting with, but I’ll come back to you on those later if that’s OK.
G’day Nathan.
Kevin has won me over. I’m not talking Kevin 07, but Kevin DeYoung.
His article, Tis Mystery All, the Immortal Dies: Why the Gospel of Christ’s Suffering is More Glorious Because God Does Not Suffer, has convinced me that [mutter, mutter … wash my mouth out with soap] impassibility is biblical. But I wish there were another word.
If you look up the dictionary definition of impassible you will see why this STOOPID word is a problem.
My New Shorter Oxford says “incapable of suffering or feeling pain. Chiefly theological. Incapable of suffering injury or damage. Not to be endured. Insufferable. Incapable of feeling or emotion.”
And the synonyms in the online thesaurus are doozies:
“callous, impassive, indifferent, insensible, passionless, unconcerned”
but it does also provide
“invincible, protected, safe, secure, strong.”
DeYoung carefully articulates it so that it doesn’t make God out to be passive, uncaring or unresponsive to our needs.
Although the idea that God suffers is popular today, he points out that if God is changeable, this means that he is not dependable and can’t be trusted.
The article, located at http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevindeyoung/files/2010/04/T4G-2010-KDY-v_2.pdf
is well worth reading, typos and all.
I think that Kev has addressed my concerns very well.
Thank you to Mark, Martin, Nathan and others for getting us thinking on this issue.
Hey, youse geezers! Why can’t we call it immutability, as Don Carson does in The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God? [See pages 61ff in my cheapo edition of the book.]
Much less likely to be misunderstood.
Good question. Mark? Is there anything that are you trying to hold on to in impassibility that isn’t covered by immutability?
Whoops!
Carson talks about immutability and God being unchanging, but does also use the dreaded word as well.
Ho hum.
Hi Sandy,
That’s a great catch, thanks for bringing it to the discussion.
It’s a simply brilliant paper that Kevin deYoung has put together. Can’t say I could do anything of that standard, but it’s certainly the kind of thing I’d aim to produce if I was doing a seminar at that kind of level. I think it’s about as easily accessible and yet substantial treatment of the issue as someone could find. Fifteen A4 pages long and not in academicese. Well worth people’s time.
These are hardly the best paragraphs in the article, but they explain clearly things that David and I have been talking about to do with emotions and passions:
Sandy, I was wondering, seeing that you’re following the discussion a bit, whether you’d be interested in adding in how you see things from your experience as a pastor and teacher? How have you found these issues cash out in your ministry? That seems to be a perspective that you (and to some degree Gordon as well) are particularly able to add in – although if you wanted to comment on the biblical, theological etc dimensions as well, I’m sure we’d all benefit.
Hi Nathan,
Honestly, I’d love to drop the word. Our modern world hates negatives so impassible, inerrant, infallible, impeccable, cause a nasty shiver up people’s spine – and not just because they come across as abstract, academic, high-faluting words.
But I can’t replace square with parallelogram. A square is a parallelogram. But I need the word ‘square’ too. I can’t replace propitiation with atonement, even though atonement is a bigger idea than propitiation. I need big ‘all encompasing’ words, and more detailed and targeted words. Immutable is the big word, impassible is the more targeted word.
A big part of the cash value of immutability is that God can be trusted. But impassibility more gets at the idea that God can make a difference, and is profoundly good and loving in his acts – hence the direction my posts have taken. God’s impassibility ‘spills over’ to us in via our passibility and because of our union with Christ – we can flee to God and find refuge from the things that seek to destroy us. Immutability as such doesn’t quite work that way I think.
Impassibility fits under immutability but it highlights a few specific very important things as a result of that specialisation.
Hi David,
Again, Kevin deYoung has done the heavy lifting, but since these issues are in play on the thread:
No, no, no. Wayne Grudem quoted my one and only article in a book he wrote and even added some nice things about it. He’s a great guy, and has a Baddeley dispensation for any naughty boy behaviour he may or may not have engaged in.
Systematic theologies are difficult. Depending on what someone wants, it’s difficult to find one that’s easy to read, substantial and reflects a classic reformed evangelical position that is engaging with the modern context. You sort of have to prioritise which qualities you want most. By their very nature of discussing the topcs systematically, almost none are able to do the sort of thing Calvin does in the Institutes and Kevin deYoung does in his paper (and I’ve tried to do in the posts) – show how the truths connect up and illuminate our knowledge of God and make a godly life possible. That’s not a problem, but you could have read a systematic theology on impassibility and still not ‘gotten’ what positive difference it makes.
That’s fantastic David. Dipping into some theology might help sensitise to you issues and why they matter in the way that this whole discussion has ended up doing for you. But you’ll still then want to go back and bring your Scriptural knowledge to bear on those issues and to adjudicate on them.
It all depends on ‘moved’. People’s suffering moves me. I feel pain when I see it and so want it to stop. I either then take action to help them, or I withdraw – either physically, or emotionally to protect myself. But even when I help them, I’ll often help them even though I don’t really love them. It just makes me feel better. That’s not wrong, it’s not sin.
But God’s not like that. God doesn’t act because it takes an internal pressure off him. He genuinely cares, is genuinely loving. His acts are purely and totally to do with what is best for us for our own sakes. It’s not because he needs to act because he just can’t bear our pain. It’s love, not fellow-feeling, so to speak, that is why God answers prayer.
So we pray because we are praying to the Father who is pure goodness and love and is absolutely committed to our welfare. That’s the kind of answer I’d give.
Love is not a passion, neither is compassion, mercy, or goodness. So, precisely because God is without passions he loves, not so much sinlessly (that’s true too, but a passion isn’t a sin necessarily), as more powerfully than we do. Our love is called forth by the loveliness of the object. We love someone because we find them lovely. We find some people fairly unlovable. That’s because we love passibly – and that’s fine, that’s what creatures do, it’s good. But God’s love is love for the unlovely. He doesn’t love us because we’re so lovely, rather his love makes us lovely. And that’s because he loves, truly, genuinely, in a way that is Godlike – it is not passible. It comes from within him, it’s not called forth from him by how good we are.
Understood rightly, I’d argue it gives us even more reason to pray than a God who is ‘moved’ by us offers.
God cares and loves because he isn’t moved.
We care and love because we are.
Both are good and right. One for God, one for creatures.
I don’t really understand this debate enough to say anything too useful.
But it seems to me that anything which some kind of ontological unchangeability of God implies could be better thought of as God’s deliberate, conscious and voluntary faithfulness to the promises he has made to his people. I think that will be more effective pastorally, too.
Hi Dannii,
It’s great to ‘see’ you again, it’s been a couple of years.
It probably isn’t going to surprise you that I don’t think this is a great way forward. I think a big part of the problem is how you’ve set up the antithesis. You seem to be implicitly playing off a God whose nature is not to change against a God who freely chooses to be faithful. It’s a nature versus will dichotomy, which then leaves us with two choices, each of which is far removed from Scripture.
On the one hand we have how you seem to have positioned the idea that God is immutable: God has a quality of ‘ontological unchangeability’ – God doesn’t change, and therefore (it seems that you think) God’s faithfulness to his promises is not deliberate, conscious and voluntary. God has to be faithful and therefore doesn’t want to be faithful. He’s like Pavolov’s dog, driven to salivate by the ringing of a bell, but not wanting to do that, gripped by forces beyond him.
On the other hand we have what seems to be your preference. A God who can change. A God who doesn’t have a nature to be good, or faithful, or love, or true. The Bible might say ‘God is true’ or ‘God cannot lie’ but these are simply figures of speech. If God was really and truly good, or faithful, or love, or true, then those qualities would be, to use your language, an ‘ontological’ quality – it would be part of what it means for God to be God, as much a part of what it means to be God as the power to create the world. And, as part of God’s very nature, part of what it means to be God, those qualities would be unchanging.
It seems you’re saying that God isn’t good or love or faithful in any very strong sense like that – they aren’t ontological qualities. God’s faithfulness (and so, presumably, every other quality like goodness and love) is a choice – ‘deliberate, conscious, and voluntary’ – and nothing more. God isn’t good. God isn’t love. Instead, God has a perfect track record of good and loving and faithful acts, or choices. God has never made a choice to do anything other than the perfectly good, loving and faithful thing. And that’s why he’s called ‘good’, ‘love’ and ‘faithful’ – because he’s a perfect example of that quality in action. But that’s all he is, an example. He could choose to be not faithful, could choose something not good, could choose not to love. Those track records are nothing more than a series of ‘deliberate, conscious and voluntary’ choices.
My problem is that this seems analogous to Adam’s faithfulness in the Garden before he sinned. Adam wasn’t good, loving, or faithful in any strong sense. His will could go either way. He had a choice, and to be good and faithful he had to keep making the same choice. Up until he chose sin Adam had a perfect record. But there was no guarantee that he would keep that perfect record – only a presumption based upon his record to that point. And this seems to be the view of God that you suggest is better than a God who does not change, and that it is more effective pastorally as well.
I think Scripture offers us something far, far better. God reveals himself as the one who really and truly is good, is true, is love, and whose will and desires are identical to his nature. God is good and ’ deliberately, consciously, and voluntarily’ chooses what is good. Nature and will align perfectly.
I’ll conclude this in the following comment.
Hi Dannii,
Concluding…
So, Heb 6:17-18 and God’s truth:
The promise here is that it is impossible for God to lie. Impossible. The promise is not that God hasn’t lied to this point and so we can afford to take a chance that he won’t in the future, but that there is no possibility for God to lie – it is completely alien to his nature. And this is tied explicitly to the encouragement we have to hold onto the hope held out to us by God. It’s pastoral. And it’s both unchanging (it’s impossible for God to lie) and voluntary – because God ‘desires’ and ‘guarantees’ ‘the unchanging nature of his purpose’. God is neither robot nor ungrounded collection of willed acts. He is true and therefore he voluntarily chooses never to lie.
Or God and love in 1 John:
1 John 4:8
If God’s love is merely a desciption of the fact that he has, so far, chosen loving acts, then this argument is fairly poor. ‘God is love’ is just a metaphor – a way of saying: ‘God has a perfect track record of voluntary loving decisions.’ But I can know someone with a perfect track record and myself not be loving. God is simply someone who is able to choose to love and has done so. I am also someone who is able to choose to love, and so, whether or not I choose that, my choice isn’t really any barrier to knowing. We’re both the same – persons free to make voluntary choices. It’s just that God has used his great power for good, and me, well…not so much.
John’s argument requires a very strong identification between God and the quality of love. God is love. And unless ‘is’ functions as a metaphor, it is making an ‘ontological’ claim – God really is identical to love. Hence why a person needs to love to know God. If you have nothing to do with love, you have nothing to do with God, because love and God are one and the same. Love is part of what it means for God to be God.
John returns to this several times. Here’s two more examples:
1 John 4:16
God is love, and so if you abide in love, you abide in God and God abides in you. If you remain in the sphere of love you remain in the sphere of God – because God and love are synonymous. And again:
1 John 4:7
If God’s love is nothing more than a collection of choices to love, then how could love be from God? ‘Love’ is more or less from nowhere – it’s just a name we give to choices persons make, whether divine or human. But John says that love comes from God so that if someone genuinely loves they are born of God. That seems only really possible if God is love as part of his very nature. And the love we have and express comes originally from God as its source.
The pastoral implications of John’s treatment of the truth that God is love seems fairly clear. But we see it also in James’ treatment of the goodness of God, and we’ll finish with that:
James 1:13
Now whether you take ‘cannot be tempted’ as the ESV translates it or go for something like ‘is not tempted’ by evil, you end up in much the same place. James is saying that God is not tempted by evil – not just that he hasn’t until now, but that it finds no hooks in God. It’s an ontological claim. God is good and so evil holds no attraction to God. Therefore, God freely chooses to tempt no one. It’s pastoral. It emphasies God’s deliberate, voluntary and conscious choice. And it guarantees to us that God will always be like that.
God is love. God is truth. God is good. And because God is those things, he does not change. His free choices are grounded in who he is. It is impossible for God to lie and therefore his oath is unchanging. God is not tempted by evil and therefore he never chooses to tempt anyone. God is love and therefore if someone loves that is evidence that God has chosen to make them born of him.