What is the doctrine of impassibility vs. passibility of God?
Few questions press harder on a reader of the Bible than this one: can God be hurt? Scripture speaks of Him as unchanging and beyond the reach of creatures, and yet it also says He was grieved to His heart — and the writers below hold both without pretending the tension is easy.
The Ancient Instinct: God Cannot Suffer
The older confession sets two things side by side in one Person and refuses to explain the join. One writer quotes a servant of God who deliberately stopped at the boundary:
VariousI know that He is truly God, from heaven, incapable of suffering. I know that He was of the seed of David, according to the flesh, a man and capable of suffering. I do not inquire how the same Person is both capable of suffering and incapable of suffering, how He is both God and Man, in case, while I busy myself about the how and investigate the manner, I should miss that good thing which is set before us.
Why the Son Became Man
If God in His own nature is untouchable, then suffering and death had to be entered, not merely endured. That is exactly the reason given for the incarnation:
James McBroomAlthough God cannot die, He has in wonderful grace taken His own way to come right down into death in its deepest and most solemn sense, even that of His own offended majesty and judgment against sin. It is here that the Incarnation fits in with divine precision.
But qualifying a statement is not the same as cancelling it, and one writer warns that over-guarding the point costs us the unity of Christ:
Truth & TestimonyWe may shrink from saying bluntly, "God died". How can God die, who has immortality and is the Source of life? … He did not die as God, but in the Manhood He had taken. However, to qualify a statement is not to deny it. To say it was the Son of Man and not God who died is to divide His Person and make Him two Persons.
A God Who Feels
Against a God of pure detachment, one writer appeals directly to the word "Father" — a name that carries obligations:
Frederick W. GrantIs our God revealed as an impassive God who does not feel? We must not credit Him with human defect or frailty, surely, but must we not credit Him with love? … "God is not man, that he should change his mind," yet He will talk about changing His mind. Not only did the LORD regret that He had made man, but "it grieved him to his heart." Blessed to know such a heart; and to know that what the Son of His bosom suffered, the bosom that held the Son suffered also.
(Older translations render these words "repent" and "it repented the LORD.")
Baby Talk That Tells the Truth
There is a way to honour the accommodating character of Bible language without emptying it. On the same verse in Genesis, one writer grants that God speaks to us in simple human terms — and insists the grief behind the terms is real:
The Bible TreasuryYet the language used is movingly suggestive of the grief it cost Him whom the unbelieving mind of man is pleased to treat as impassive. … No doubt, as is so characteristic of these early revelations, the expression is by grace adapted in childlike fashion to the heart and conscience of man. The LORD felt deeply what man ought to have felt but did not.
Unchanging, Yet Not Unmoved
Commentators differ over how far divine feeling may be pressed. One writer records a modern voice arguing that "incapacity to suffer is not a sign of largeness, but of littleness," and that separating divine from human experience tears the unity of Christ's Person (William Kelly). Others keep changelessness and affection in one sentence, so that the second is as steady as the first:
J. G. BellettHe is "the same yesterday and today and forever," in His own proper glory. With Him "there is no variation or shadow due to change," according to His essential, divine nature. But so also in His knowledge of us, His relationship to us, His affections for us, and His way with us.
The Practical Point
The Man of sorrows was not less than God while He wept; He felt more, not less, than we do:
An Outline of Sound WordsThe Son of God as a divine Person had a capacity for knowing what sin was in man as no other man could, and a capacity for grief that man could not have. … Perfect holiness in the nature of the Son of God repelled sin, yet His deep compassion enabled Him to enter sympathetically into what sin had brought upon men.
Summary
- Nature. In His own being God is "incapable of suffering" — and one writer deliberately refuses to probe how the same Person is both able and unable to suffer.
- Need. Sin required a death that God, as God, could not undergo: "How can God die, who has immortality and is the Source of life?"
- Gift. So the Son became Man "for this very purpose, that He might die" — He entered what He could not otherwise experience.
- Heart. Scripture still says it grieved Him to His heart, and one writer answers the idea of an unfeeling God bluntly: must we not credit Him with love?
- Reach. Because He is unchanging in "His affections for us," His feeling is not a mood that passes but the fixed character you can lean on.