Divine Impassibility: Does God Feel Emotions Like We Do?

The doctrine of divine impassibility has fallen on hard times. Some theologians today reject the doctrine outright or only accept a redefined version, while others have simply forgotten about it. Even when believers talk about impassibility, many seem confused over its exact meaning.

In this article, I aim to define, defend, and delineate why the doctrine of divine impassibility still matters for our worship and spiritual comfort.

What is divine impassibility?

Simply put, the doctrine of divine impassibility teaches that God does not have created flesh since he is Spirit (John 4:24) and the Creator. God has no “flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal 5:24), and for this reason, God is impassible. By contrast, God created humans to have fleshly bodies.

A passion is something like irritability or anger. When we lack sleep, we get irritable. When we lack food, we get hangry. Both forms of anger are passions of the flesh. Hence, Peter can say, “I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul” (1 Pet 2:11 ESV). The key here is that passions of the flesh change and overcome us. In our fallen state, sin entangles itself with the passions and desires of the flesh.

Passions and desires of the flesh, in and of themselves, are not always sinful. Yet since we live in mortal and corrupt bodies (1 Cor 15:42, 53), we undergo an inner conflict between “the law of my mind” and “the law of sin that dwells in my [bodily] members” (Rom 7:23 ESV). And this leads to a disorder of our passions, which itself is sinful and leads to more sin. We thus suffer both disordered desires and physical pain as passible creatures.

God, in contrast, suffers no disorder of passions. He is immutable. He does not get irritable towards us because of a hormone imbalance or to lack of sleep. God does not miss a meal and bark at us in wrath.

Nor does he follow the lusts of his flesh as the Greek gods of the past did. Zeus was known for entering into the world of mankind and disguising himself in creaturely shapes to rape and seduce mortal women. Since Zeus was like us, having passions and desires of the flesh, he gave into those fleshly temptations.¹ God is not like Zeus. God’s nature is not our created nature.

Historically, Christians affirmed impassibility to show how the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob differed from the Greek gods like Zeus, Hermes, and Poseidon. Our God does not follow his lusts and passions due to his created flesh. He cannot because he is the Creator, not the creature.

In other words, divine impassibility is a negative doctrine (apophatic). By contrast, positive statements (kataphatic) like “God is Spirit” (John 4:24), “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16), or God fills earth, heaven, highest heaven through his spiritual mode of existence (cf. 1 Kgs 8:27) signal something positive about God. Impassibility, along with doctrines like divine simplicity and immutability, however, is a negative doctrine. It says nothing positive about God. It is not intended to. Impassibility says nothing about God except that he is not a creature (implying, of course, that he is Creator) and not like the Greek gods which Christians reject.

Impassibility at its most basic level, therefore, says nothing about God except what he is not. God is not human or a Greek god like Zeus. God has no created body. He has no sinews, blood vessels, or hormones. Those belong to created bodies like ours. God, as Jesus says, is Spirit (John 4:24).

Why do some deny divine impassibility?

One important reason why theologians sometimes reject the doctrine of impassibility is its association with Greek philosophy.

The most well-known advocate of the “Hellenization thesis” was Adolf Harnack (1851–1930). In his History of Dogma, Harnack declared that the most important premises of Catholic doctrine derive from “the Hellenic spirit.”² Since the New Testament itself does not contain these premises, Harnack argued that some Catholic doctrine cannot be traced to Scripture.

Harnack has in mind the doctrines of God, the Trinity, and Christology that councils like Nicaea (325/381) and Chalcedon (451) affirmed. His position relies on the assumption that “Judaism and Hellenism in the age of Christ were opposed to each other.”³ So any doctrine with a Greek bent cannot derive from the Bible. Divine impassibility has particularly fallen under this criticism of being too Greek and insufficiently based on Scripture.

After Harnack, denying divine impassibility became commonplace. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, famously wrote while in prison that “Only the suffering God can help us now.”⁴ Jürgen Moltmann for his part affirmed that God suffered at the cross, and that a believer “suffers with God’s suffering.”⁵ For Moltmann, divine impassibility represented a relic of Greek philosophical thinking that has no place in dogma derived from the Bible.

In recent decades, a number of living theologians have slandered divine impassibility as an artifact of Greek thinking.⁶ One recent evangelical theologian has simply stated that “it is necessary to reject divine impassibility.”⁷ Clearly, impassibility no longer feels like a doctrine that Christian theologians must accept like justification by faith or Christ’s personal union of two natures. It is now a doctrine that one can reject without great fear of challenge. After all, it is in the minds of many simply a borrowing from Greek philosophy.

Such rejections would surprise early Christians who affirmed this precisely to counter Greek conceptions of God and instead to affirm God as the Bible describes him.

Why did early Christians affirm impassibility?

Due to the critique that divine impassibility improperly adapts Greek modes of thinking, it is worth looking at some early Greek (and Latin) church fathers and why they affirmed the doctrine of impassibility.

Among the early apologists of the second century and writers of the later third century, the doctrine of impassibility arose partly from an apologetic attempt to show how the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Job differed from Zeus, Poseidon, and Hermes. They did so by denying that God has a created body like the Greek gods did, and so God did not live by passions and desires of the flesh like Zeus. To cite one extended example, Justin Martyr (c. 100–165) in his First Apology writes:

And, secondly, because we, who out of every race of men and women used to worship Dionysus the son of Semele, and Apollo the son of Leto, who in their passion with men did such things of which it is shameful even to speak of, and Persephone and Aphrodite, who were stung to madness by love for Adonis and whose mysteries you also celebrate, or Asclepius, or some one or other of those who are called gods—have now, through Jesus Christ, learned to despise them, though threatened with death for it, and have dedicated ourselves to the unbegotten and impassible God; we are not persuaded that He ever was goaded by lust for Antiope, or such other women, or of Ganymede, nor was He delivered by that hundred-handed monster, whose aid was obtained through Thetis, nor, on this account, was anxious that her son Achilles should destroy many of the Greeks because of his concubine Briseis. We pity those who believe these things, and we recognize those who invented them to be demons.⁸

Justin contrasts the pagan gods who are led by the lusts of passion and the God of the Bible who is neither born in the flesh (unbegotten) or given to such passions (impassible).

Paul Gavrilyuk comments on this general pattern among early Christians: “by calling the Christian God impassible the Fathers sought to distance God the creator from the gods of mythology.”⁹ Likewise, Thomas Weinandy states while discussing three early Christian apologists that, “To say that God is immutable and impassible is to deny of him those attributes that would make him like the fickle and sensuous pagan gods or like sinful and corruptible humankind.”¹⁰

What about Jesus?

God the Word of the Father became flesh (John 1:1, 14) and died on the cross. Thus, nobody denies that Christ suffered at the cross. But did that mean God the Son became passible by nature?

For Nestorius (386–451), preserving the incorruptibility and impassibility of God involved using language that appeared to divide Christ into two persons: (1) the man who was assumed and (2) the Word of God who assumed the man. Refuting Nestorius and his school, Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376–444) wrote,

they are afraid to attribute human characteristics to him in case he might somehow be dishonored by them, and brought down to a dishonorable state. This is why they maintain that he assumed a man and conjoined him to himself, and that it is to this man that all the human characteristics relate and can be attributed while absolutely no damage is done to the nature of the Word himself.¹¹

Notice how Cyril characterizes the debate around the nature of Christ as centering on the question of: Can the Word experience dishonor and damage? That is, Cyril characterizes the debate between himself and the Nestorians as one that involves impassibility. Nestorius implies that God the Son did not suffer at the cross, while Cyril affirmed that God the Son did. Cyril explained, “They think it is not at all right to attribute the suffering upon the cross to the Word born of God.”¹² If, however, God the Son did not die for us, then

we have no longer been redeemed by God (how could we have been?) but rather by the blood of someone else. Some man or other, an imposter and a falsely-named son, has died for us. The great and venerable mystery of the incarnation of the Only Begotten has turned out to be only words and lies, for he never really became man after all. We certainly could not regard him as our Savior who gave his blood for us, we would have to attribute this to that man.

But, as Cyril claims, we indeed have been “redeemed by God.”¹³

In his stark way, Cyril proclaimed “that the Word of God the Father suffered in the flesh for our sake.”¹⁴ And it is precisely in his own flesh “where the suffering occurs.”¹⁵ In other words, God the Son truly suffered, as it was not just any flesh, but the flesh that was “his very own” that suffered.¹⁶

This does not mean Cyril affirmed God’s passibility, as such. But he spoke of the suffering of God the Word, the incarnate Christ himself. For Cyril, one reason why the Word became flesh (John 1:14) was in order to suffer for our sake. And the only place that God the Son could suffer was in his own flesh because only the flesh is passible, that is, capable of suffering. The Word or Son of God made flesh his very own in order to suffer and die for us and for our salvation.

Notice that the Word remained alive while tasting death: “The Word was alive even when his holy flesh was tasting death, so that when death was beaten and corruption trodden underfoot the power of the resurrection might come upon the whole human race.”¹⁷ This is because “he did not suffer in the nature of the godhead, but in his own flesh.”¹⁸ God as such did not suffer since that would mean not only that an impassible nature would be passible, but also that the Father and Spirit suffered at the cross, which is absurd. Christ alone suffered on the cross and tasted death (Heb 2:9).

So does God have emotions or affections?

Although impassibility denies that God has creaturely passions, it does not exclude the possibility that God has any affective life. After all, the Bible says “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). Throughout Scripture, God describes himself with passions such as compassion, joy, and love (Exod 34:6; Zeph 3:17; Jer 31:3). Given this biblical emphasis, some Christians have spoken of God as having emotions as the Creator God who has no created body of flesh.

Early conceptions of God’s affections—or lack thereof

A number of early Christians tried to understand God’s affective life by reflecting on the meaning of the word passibility. At least two main opinions existed among early Christians. First, some argued that passion or compassion (these words are related) meant that the agent who has passion suffers. Tertullian, for example, in Adversus Praxean defines (or at least implies) that compassion is suffering with another (4.§29).

On the other hand, others spoke of passion or compassion as relieving the suffering of another without a necessary change in the agent. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–394) makes such an argument in his Contra Eunomium (3.4.§724; also his Great Catechism 14). Gregory claims that to have sympathy or compassion for someone means that one affects the sufferer, not the sufferer the agent.¹⁹

Gregory follows Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–253) who in his Contra Celsum (4.14) outlines an analogy of the Word being like a doctor who comes to humanity in order to heal them of their sicknesses. As a doctor, the Word does not undergo any change essentially due to his love for humanity. But the doctor in his sympathy for a patient brings health to the patient. Likewise, to speak of the Word’s philanthropy of sympathy for humankind does not require any change in the one who is Love, from Love and from whom Love proceeds (see On First Principles 2.10.6).

Importantly for Origen, the reason why God the Word undergoes no change in his philanthropy is because he has no created body as God (qua God). In fact, he lodges the Christian view of the Logos against the Epicurean and Stoic views of god—views that allege god’s corporeality and changeableness. But that’s precisely what the doctrine of impassibility aims to deny: The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not like the gods of the pagans. God has no body, flesh, or passions of the flesh.

Given Origen’s relatively early date, we can forgive him for being slightly infelicitous in his language. Were we to apply Cyril of Alexandria’s Christology to the above analogy, we might conclude that God in himself has compassion like a doctor healing a patient but God the Son, who made flesh his own, suffers in both kinds of ways in his flesh.

Distinguishing kataphatic and apophatic statements about God

However one wants to define impassibility, one must remember that it negates the affirmation of passibility in any bodily way against the pagans. As the Bible says, God is the Creator who is uncreated Spirit and fills heavens and earth (Jer 23:24).

This denial of passions in God affirms nothing positive or constructive, and we ought not to think it does. If we do so, we might make the particularly odd statement that God has no affective or emotional life on the basis of this doctrine. Whether or not this is true—and many confessions do deny affections and passions in God at all—that at least should not be found as the essence of the apophatic doctrine of impassibility.

Hence, Origen will clearly claim that “God must be believed to be altogether impassible and free from all these [creaturely] affections.”²⁰ But then he can also say that God “suffers something of love” when someone prays to him.²¹ No contradiction appears here when one remembers both Origen’s doctrine of sympathy and that Origen affirms a form of suffering in God that completely denies the creaturely imperfections of the flesh. He affirms that God’s love is steady and perfect as it lifts us up (see Hom. Ezek. 6.6.3).

Put more simply, Origen affirms that God is love positively, and so he must suffer something of love! That is a positive or kataphatic statement about God. The apophatic or negative statement of God (namely, his impassibility) denies creaturely affections, passions, and desires of the flesh. God has no created body or flesh.

Disagree with Origen all day. (I am not Origen’s defender!) But I do think he illustrates an important difference between the apophatic and kataphatic statements of God. Impassibility specifically denies but does not affirm anything of God. Divine goodness or love specifically affirms something about God, and so Origen wants to say something positive of God, not mere empty statements.

Differentiating God’s affections from creaturely ones

As Thomas Weinandy affirms, “For God to be impassible and immutable is not to deny love and compassion of him, but to establish in his unchangeably perfect being a love that is absolutely and utterly passionate.”²² God is love. God is holy. God is compassionate. There is no variance of change in him—but he is life overflowing.

In contrast, I change all the time—and so my emotional life does, too. Sometimes when I am sick, I get impatient. When I am in pain, I become frustrated easily. By contrast, God does not become impatient or frustrated due to sickness or pain. So whatever words we use to describe God’s affective life (anger, compassion, love, etc.), we need to apply them to God as God the Creator and to us as the creature.

In his characteristically detailed explanation, Thomas Aquinas explains how the passions of love and joy are in God. First, he distinguishes this from how humans experience the passions through our five senses, which our created flesh mediates: “in us the sensitive appetite is the proximate motive-force of our bodies. Some bodily change therefore always accompanies an act of the sensitive appetite, and this change affects especially the heart.”²³ Because passions arise in us through our bodily senses, or rather our sensitive appetites, they bring about in humans “some bodily change” and are properly called passions.

As he says a little later though, “acts of the sensitive appetite, inasmuch as they have annexed to them some bodily change, are called passions; whereas acts of the will are not so called.”²⁴ Notice that “acts of the will” are not called passions since acts of the will do not imply a bodily change.

So Aquinas concludes regarding God, “Love, therefore, and joy and delight are passions; in so far as they denote acts of the intellective appetite, they are not passions. It is in this latter sense that they are in God.”²⁵ So while love and joy are ordinarily passions, they exist in God as “acts of the intellective appetite.”²⁶ That is, according to God’s intellectual (i.e., spiritual) nature, then, they are not passions because they do not effect a change in God.

Put simply, Thomas Aquinas defines a passion as something that effects a bodily change in a creature. Since God does not have a created body, he cannot be said to have passions as a human has them. Yet the passions of love and joy exist in God supremely—in the fullest way possible. Yet they do not change God bodily, since he is purely spiritual or intellectual by nature (i.e., without a created body).

Rather than impassibility meaning that God does not have an affective life, it denies that God has a creaturely affective life. This paves the way for us to affirm the biblical teaching that, as Weinandy says, “joy and delight are properly in God.”²⁷ God has a perfect, unchanging, and overflowing love that cannot become more perfect or lack some perfection due to a bodily change. God is Love (John 4:8, 16).

Why impassibility still matters today

The doctrine of divine impassibility means that God is not like the gods of our Hindu neighbors, nor is he the remote God of Islam. Instead, God the Word made human flesh his own in order to suffer in our place out of love. And since God does not have fleshly changes in himself, we can be assured, in the words of John Webster, that “his love is of infinite scope and benevolence.”²⁸

Let me put it more directly. When tragedy strikes, you never have to doubt that God is maximally love or that he loves you perfectly, fully, and in his entire being. The most basic truth of Christianity is that God is love, and that he loves everything that he has created—including you and me. Nothing can change that because God’s love is not changeable or passible. God’s love burns impassibly without fail for you.

The doctrine of divine impassibility is a negative doctrine. It denies that God has a created body or flesh with its passions and desires. It does not affirm anything positive. It is apophatic, not kataphatic.

Yet it frees us to affirm what the Bible does say; namely, that God is love in his very being. Impassibility liberates us from thinking of God’s love as though it were as fickle or conditional as human love can be. Instead, God’s love accords with his spiritual nature. He is love. And he loves you and me.

Recommended resources from Wyatt Graham

• Paul Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God. Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Thomas Weinandy, Does God Suffer? University of Notre Dame Press, 2000.

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1. The best Greek thinkers therefore posited a single spiritual supreme God sometimes called the One or the Good who created not only the gods but also humanity.
2. Adolf Harnack, History of Dogma, trans. Neil Buchanan (Little, Brown, and Company, 1902), 1:48–49.
3. Harnack, History of Dogma, 1:71.
4. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (Fortress Press, 2015), 465.
5. Jûrgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (Fortress Press, 1993), 272.
6. For example, N. T. Wright recently claimed: “God was grieved to his heart, Genesis declares, over the violent wickedness of his human creatures. He was devastated when his own bride, the people of Israel, turned away from him. And when God came back to his people in person—the story of Jesus is meaningless unless that’s what it’s about—he wept at the tomb of his friend. St. Paul speaks of the Holy Spirit ‘groaning’ within us, as we ourselves groan within the pain of the whole creation. The ancient doctrine of the Trinity teaches us to recognize the One God in the tears of Jesus and the anguish of the Spirit.” In the same article, he speaks of certain Christians who “like to think of God as above all that, knowing everything, in charge of everything, calm and unaffected by the troubles in his world.” Echoing the Hellenization thesis of Harnack, Wright simply cannot affirm divine impassibility since “That’s not the picture we get in the Bible.” See N. T. Wright, “Christianity Offers No Answers About the Coronavirus. It’s Not Supposed To,” Time, March 29, 2020. https://time.com/5808495/coronavirus-christianity/.
7. John S. Feinberg, No One Like Him: The Doctrine of God, Foundations of Evangelical Theology (Crossway Books, 2001), 277.
8. Justin Martyr, The First and Second Apologies, ed. Walter J. Burghardt et al., trans. Leslie William Barnard, Ancient Christian Writers 56 (Paulist Press, 1997), 40. Emphasis added.
9. Paul Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God (Oxford University Press, 2004), 48.
10. Thomas Weinandy, Does God Suffer? (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), 89.
11. Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, ed. John Behr, trans. John Anthony McGuckin, Popular Patristics Series 13 (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 98.
12. Cyril, On the Unity of Christ, 111–12.
13. Cyril, On the Unity of Christ, 112.
14. Cyril, On the Unity of Christ, 115.
15. Cyril, On the Unity of Christ, 117.
16. Cyril, On the Unity of Christ, 118.
17. Cyril, On the Unity of Christ, 115.
18. Cyril, On the Unity of Christ, 115.
19. Whether or not Gregory believes this analogy holds true for both created and Uncreated natures, I am not quite sure. In any case, Gregory here disagrees with the definition of passibility as is found in Aristotle’s Ten Categories. I note this here since impassibility for most of the Greek fathers specifically countered Greek philosophical notions about God.
20. Origen of Alexandria, On First Principles: A Reader’s Edition, trans. John Behr (Oxford University Press, 2019), 2.4.4.
21. Origen of Alexandria, Homilies 1–14 on Ezekiel, ed. Dennis D. McManus, trans. Thomas P. Scheck, Ancient Christian Writers 62 (Newman Press, 2010), 6.6.3.
22. Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, 94.
23. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. The Aquinas Institute, trans. Laurence Shapcote (Aquinas Institute, 2018), 13:I.20.A1.
24. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 13:1.20.A1.
25. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 13:1.20.A1.
26. The intellective appetite is the will. God perfectly knows the good and loves it with no variance or change.
27. Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, 126.
28. John Webster, God Without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology, God and the Works of God (T&T Clark, 2016), 1:125.