Does God Have Feelings (Part 2)?
Many of the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith must be held in a nuanced tension. In his famous book Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, J.I. Packer calls such tension an antinomy. What, you may ask, does that word mean? An antinomy is the appearance of a contradiction between two necessary, logical, and essential conclusions. Examples of such abound in orthodox theology. Take for example, the Trinity. God is one in essence, but He is also three in person. And, as Gregory Nazianzus reminds us, I cannot think of the one without also thinking of the three, and I cannot think of the three without also thinking of the one. I am not sure I can explain that, but I am quite sure I believe it. Another antinomy would be the truth of divine sovereignty and human responsibility. God decrees whatsoever comes to pass, and yet in such a way that, rather than undermining my freedom, He actually establishes it. Again, I can’t explain it, but I believe it because the Bible teaches it. “How can I reconcile divine sovereignty and human responsibility?” Packer asks, “There is no need, for friends need no reconciliation.
I would argue that a similar antinomy exists between the affections of the Godhead and the pure unbounded simplicity of His infinite, eternal, and unchangeable nature. How can an unchanging God experience grief, anger, sorrow, joy, etc? I don’t know, but He tells me He does and I believe Him.
Let’s think through this antinomy for a second . . .
God is simple. As pure Spirit, He does not exist as the sum of various parts. God is all of His attributes. Or as one modern writer put it, “All that is in God is God.” As the Lord of all, God’s Spirit is pure action (actus purus). That is to say that though He acts in, through, and against His creation, it cannot return the favor. We cannot act against Him to induce change in the Godhead. He is unchangeable. He is perfectly blessed. We cannot ruin His day, rain on His parade, much less victimize Him. All this is true. Yet if we only hold on to this truth, we end up with a cold God, without feelings, beyond the capacity of the give-and-take of real relationships not only with His creation, but also perhaps even within the Godhead itself (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). Surely this can’t be true unless, that is, we are to tear out page after page of God’s own self-revelation in the Bible.
God is also personal, relational, and affectional. That is to say that He is not just pure mathematically precise logic. He loves and He hates in a manner consistent with all the intensity of His boundless nature. He is, as we have said, “Fiercely fair-minded, and jealous of all those He loves.” When we say that God is without body, parts, or passions (WCF II:1), we are not saying that there is absolutely no analogy in the Godhead of human affections, feelings, and emotions. We walk a narrow line here. Affections, by their very nature, describe the movement of a soul affected by some truth outside of itself. So, for example, we hear some bad news, and our heart is instantly awash with turmoil. This does not happen to God in any way, shape or form. Filling the space-time continuum as He does, God doesn’t experience new events amidst an endless succession of present moments. He sees everything at once, and comprehends it all in an eternal instant of complete understanding.
Yet that does not mean that God is entirely destitute of feeling. W.G.T. Shedd (as a passionate defender of the impassibility of God - pun zealously intended) puts it so well,
“It is important to remember this signification of the term 'passion,' (“without body parts, and passions”) and the (Confession’s) intention in employing it. Sometimes it has been understood to be synonymous with feeling or emotion, and the erroneous and demoralizing inference has been drawn, that the Divine nature is destitute of feeling altogether.”
An Unmoved Mover, the God of Plato’s supposed ideal, would be a depressing prospect indeed. Why would you pray to God who didn’t care to listen to your prayers? The easy repost, to be sure, is “Pray because He tells you to pray.” And I cannot deny that, but what joy would there be in praying to a God who couldn’t listen, or who couldn’t at least allow Himself to be affected by our words?
When I hear impassibility extremists extol the glories of such a God, it sounds all so very…, well, unbiblical. I say that because throughout the length and breadth of Scripture, God describes Himself as being moved with compassion, His heart grows warm (Hosea 11:9), His anger burns, His Spirit is capable of feeling grief at human speech ( Ephesians 4:30), and outrage at our propensity to trample God’s own Son underfoot (Hebrews 10:29). He speaks of Himself coming down to see what’s going on in earth (Genesis 11), etc. Now, of course, God doesn’t come down. His presence, after all, fills all time and space. I get that. But He says He comes down. Why? Well, I certainly don’t pretend to know in full, but I am fully convinced God uses language like this to remove any fear that He is unresponsive to, or unfeeling about His creation.
Clearly, then, we have an appropriate Biblical tension, and we must honor and not annul it. God is unchangeably perfect, and yet, in a manner appropriate to His nature, this unchangeably perfect Being is capable of something at least analogous to the full range of unfallen human feelings, affections, and emotions.
No one has helped me grapple with this subject more than Robert Lewis Dabney and his remarkable essay entitled, “God’s Indiscriminate Proposals of Mercy.” In this essay, Dabney wrestles with how God can sincerely beg reprobate sinners to be reconciled to Him? Are these offers sincere? Does God put His heart into them?
If they are sincere, why doesn’t God in His compassion, extend His omnipotent grace in the reprobate’s direction and do for them what they cannot do for themselves, that is, actually save them? This is the classic Arminian objection to the Calvinistic formulation of election, effectual calling, the free offer of the gospel, etc. If God wishes the unbeliever to come, why doesn’t He effectually draw him to come? In response, some Hyper-Calvinists prefer to go to the opposite extreme by saying that God’s only affection towards the reprobate is one of pure indignation, being angry with the wicked every day. In this view, He looks upon them with the contempt that they deserve, not the compassion that they need.
I believe such a statement is at best a half truth, and does grave injustice to the tender, compassionate heart of the Godhead--the Kind of heart that feels no pleasure in the death of the wicked. Dabney wholeheartedly concurs. In the course of his essay, he uses an illustration from the life of George Washington and the events surrounding his signing of the death warrant of the rash and unfortunate Major André. Writes one of Washington’s biographers, “Perhaps no occasion of his life did the commander-in-chief obey with more reluctance the stern mandates of duty of policy.” Dabney goes on to assert:
“In this historical instance we have these facts: Washington had plenary power to kill or to save alive. His compassion for the criminal was real and profound. Yet he signed his death-warrant with spontaneous decision. The solution is not the least difficult either for philosophy or common sense. Every deliberate rational volition is regulated by the agent’s dominant subjective disposition, and prompted by his own subjective motive . . . The simplest motive of man’s rational volition is a complex of two elements: a desire of propension of some subjective optative (wishful) power, and a judgment of the intelligence as to the true and preferable . . . Washington’s volition to sign the death-warrant of André did not arise from the fact that his compassion was slight or feigned, but from the fact that it it was rationally counterpoised by a complex of superior judgments and propulsions of wisdom, fury, patriotism, and moral indignation.”
Do you see Dabney’s point? His opponents are saying that either God feels compassion for the wicked or He doesn’t. If He does feel compassion for the wicked and He can save them (as the Calvinist’s argue), then He must save them. Therefore, because all the wicked are not saved, only two things can be true: either God feels compassion for the lost but is powerless to save them without their own permission (the Arminian position), or else He feels no compassion for them whatsoever (The Hyper-Calvinistic position).
Dabney plots a third course. Imagine, he says, you were there when Washington signed André’s death warrant with “deepest reluctance and pity,” what would you have said? “Pah, your compassion and pity is hypocritical? If you feel pity, Washington, you must pardon the man!” No, Dabney says, “The petulance of this charge would have been equal to its folly. The pity was real, but was restrained by superior elements of motive…. His pity was genuine, and yet his volition not to indulge it free and sovereign.”
In conclusion, Dabney contends:
The correct answer to the Arminian is to show him that the existence of a real and unfeigned pity in God for “him that dieth,” does not imply that God has exhausted his divine power in vain to renew the creature’s “free-will” in a way consistent with his nature, because the pity may have been truly in God, and yet countervailed by superior motives, so that he did not will to exert his omnipotence for that sinner’s renewal. The other extreme receives the same reply; the absence of an omnipotent, and inevitably efficient, volition to renew that soul does not prove the absence of a true compassion in God for him.
In other words, the compassion was there, but it was restrained from rising to effect the sinner’s salvation by other motives, ones perhaps known only to God.
In conclusion, what can we say about the heart of God? Does He feel or not? Clearly, to remain within the sphere of orthodoxy, we must affirm a number of points:
God is unchangeably blessed and maintains a posture of infinite, eternal, and unchangeable perfection. This is not some stagnant pool of perfection; however, it is ablaze with God’s excellent glory and overflows in every direction.
God is also absolutely sovereign and governs space, time, and all the events of history by an unchangeable and irresistible decree. And so, while God is neither the author nor the approver of evil, He did allow evil into His creation, and that not by a bare (mere) permission (Proverbs 16:4).
In a manner consistent with His nature, God feels the way He ought to feel when His perfections encounter a finite universe created in glory and but now fallen in sin. When God looks upon evil, He does not feel nothing.
God uses words like sorrow, repentance, grief, love, patience, long-suffering to describe the way that His perfections intercept a fallen universe. These words represent God’s own attempt to reach across the infinite divide separating us from Him. These words must mean something. God is describing Himself honestly, though incompletely. But accommodation (think of a father stooping to prattle to His infant Son) is not deception. To read some authors, you might easily be forgiven for thinking such emotive language on God’s part is an exaggeration-- as if God was somehow trying to persuade his earthly children that He actually feels much more for us than He actually does. And that simply cannot be true.
The man Christ Jesus is the climactic Revelation of God. We must take care to remember that Jesus has both a divine nature and a human nature, yet these natures exist in eternal separation. They are not confused or mixed together. The divine does not convert the human nature into a superman, nor does the human demean the divine nature into a demi-God. The two natures do not, furthermore, consume one another. They exist in eternal separation, yet they connect to the one Person, God’s Son. In that regard, as Dabney says, “It is our happiness to believe that when we see Jesus weeping over lost Jerusalem, we have seen the Father, [and] we have received an insight into the divine benevolence and pity.”
In the final analysis, God has said these things about Himself, and while we dare not say more, we surely must not say less!