What is the doctrine of the impassibility vs. passibility of God?
The question of whether God can suffer — whether He is "impassible" (beyond suffering) or "passible" (capable of suffering) — touches the very heart of the person of Christ. In classical theology, divine impassibility holds that God in His essential nature cannot be acted upon, cannot suffer, cannot be subject to emotional changes imposed from without. The question becomes most acute at the cross: did the Son of God truly suffer, or did His divine nature remain untouched while only His humanity bore the pain?
The writers represented on stempublishing.com address this with remarkable clarity, and they come down firmly: Christ truly suffered, and any doctrine that denies or diminishes His real suffering is not from God but from the enemy.
The Early Heresy of an "Impassible Christ"
William Kelly confronts this question directly in his Introduction to Luke's Gospel. Commenting on Christ's agony in Gethsemane and the early scribal tendency to expunge Luke 22:43-44 (the angel strengthening Him, the bloody sweat), Kelly identifies the root problem:
William Kelly"It was an early error to suppose an impassible Christ. There is no worse invention against the truth, unless it be the lie which denies Him to be God the Son. An unsuffering impassible Christ is of Satan, not the true God and eternal life. It is a false chimera of the enemy. Be assured, that if the suffering be so real and precious to God, it is a dangerous thing to pare down, fritter away, or deny any part of it."
Kelly traces this error to the early church, where some, out of misguided reverence for Christ's deity, "thought it impossible that the Lord Jesus could suffer thus." He notes that some went so far as to expunge verses from Scripture — "some to stigmatize these verses, others to strike them out" — while in modern times, "they do not believe them. Men pass them over as if there was nothing for the soul in them, as if the Saviour Son of God condescended to a show, a pantomime, instead of enduring the severest conflict and anguish that ever had been the portion of a human heart on this earth."
Kelly insists that His Godhead did not diminish the reality of His suffering, and to suggest otherwise destroys the value of the cross:
"It is not a question, however, of His merely being God; and you destroy the value of the suffering if you do not give full place to His humanity. Not that His Godhead ever made His suffering less; else the result would have been some nondescript estate which was neither Godhead nor manhood, but somewhat made up of both."
The Godhead and Suffering: Darby's Insight
J.N. Darby goes even further, making the striking observation that Christ's divine nature did not shield Him from suffering — it deepened it:
J.N. Darby"He never used His Godhead to save Himself from suffering, but to feel it the more."
For Darby, the union of the divine and human natures in Christ meant not that the divine nature acted as an anaesthetic, but rather that His infinite capacity as God gave an infinite depth to His human experience of suffering. He adds:
"I know that all the fulness of the Godhead is in Him, and I know that He offered strong crying and tears, in dependence upon God as a man, and that is unfathomable. The very fact of His humiliation is a proof that He is God, because if any creature keeps not his first estate he goes into sin."
The Impassible Godhead and the Eternal Sonship
V.W.J.H.L., writing in defence of the Eternal Sonship of Christ, uses the terms "impassible" and "passible" in a related but distinct sense — to address those who deny that Sonship can belong to the Godhead because sonship implies inferiority:
V.W.J.H.L."Even if it could be shown to be true of human conditions, this would not constitute a reason for compelling the impassible Godhead to exist only according to what is proper to passible creatures. Nothing could be more morally degrading to the mind that postulates such a theory of compulsion."
Here "impassible" carries the weight of the classical meaning — God is not subject to the limitations and conditions proper to creatures. But the author's point is that human categories (like "a son must be inferior to a father") cannot be imposed upon divine relations. The Godhead transcends creaturely categories without being emptied of relationship or feeling.
The same writer identifies the connection to the ancient heresy of Docetism:
"In the early days of the Church, Docetism, a gnostic heresy... rejected the reality of our Lord's Humanity on the ground that a true incarnation of God was impossible by virtue of the supposed antagonism between what God is as infinitely good and what matter is as fundamentally evil."
Both Docetism (denying Christ's real humanity) and the denial of Eternal Sonship spring, he argues, from the same root: an a priori assumption imposed on Scripture rather than received from it.
Christ's Suffering Was Real — Body and Soul
T.O. Mawson brings this to bear practically in his address "Suffering Love":
T.O. Mawson"I think sometimes we forget that the Lord suffered physically, probably as no other could suffer. He never used His Godhead power to alleviate His human suffering, and when He cried, 'I thirst,' we see the suffering Man, the suffering Man in His perfection expressing the fact that He suffered."
Mawson insists that the suffering was not merely physical but reached into the depths of His soul:
"He was bruised physically, but His soul was bruised also. His soul was made an offering for sin. He was there beneath the stroke of Divine justice that God's throne might stand in everlasting rectitude and that His grace might pour out in salvation to you and me. And no tongue of mortal can tell what those sufferings meant to Him, no heart can conceive them."
The Son in the Godhead — Suffering Without Ceasing to Be God
Mawson also addresses the wonder that it was the Son — not a mere creature — who suffered:
"Though He were Son, yet learned He obedience by the things that He suffered. The Son in the Godhead, whose prerogative it was to command and uphold all things by the word of His power, took the servant's place, but He did not cease to be the Son when He did that."
The Categories of Christ's Suffering
J.B.P., writing in The Bible Treasury on "The Sufferings of Christ," carefully distinguishes multiple dimensions of Christ's suffering, all of which were real:
J.B.P."Not only, then, in atonement did Christ suffer. In Hebrews 5:7-8, we read, 'Who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications, with strong crying and tears...' Admitting the paramount importance of the atonement, and how absolutely alone that work stands — how precious is it to our hearts to study and ponder over the sufferings of our Lord as man!"
He identifies four categories: (1) suffering in sympathy with others; (2) suffering for righteousness' sake; (3) suffering as rejected Messiah; and (4) the unique atoning suffering under God's forsaking on the cross. None of these were a show. All were real.
Synthesis
These writers hold a clear and unified position. They affirm that God in His essential nature — the "impassible Godhead" — transcends creaturely limitations and conditions. But they reject with equal force any suggestion that Christ's divine nature rendered His sufferings unreal, diminished, or merely apparent.
The key distinction is this: impassibility properly understood guards the truth that God is not a victim of circumstances, not subject to involuntary change or external compulsion. But it must never be pressed to deny that the Son of God, in becoming man, truly and voluntarily entered into real suffering — suffering of body, soul, and spirit — and that His divine nature, far from cushioning the blow, gave that suffering an infinite depth and value. As Darby put it, He used His Godhead not to shield Himself from suffering, but "to feel it the more."