FREE CHURCHCOLLEGE
Bachelor of Theology
Academic Year 2009/2010
Systematic Theology 2.2
Term Essay:
Book Review
Weinandy, T.G. Does God Suffer? (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000)
3345 words
Registration No.: 0705
Summary Introduction
In the book ‘Does God Suffer?’ Thomas Weinandy offers an erudite, able and sensitive defense of the traditional Christian doctrine of divine impassibility. The work is undertaken in response to the slew of contemporary theologies which advocate the need for espousing a passibly suffering God in contemporary Christian proclamation. Weinandy’s polemic is driven by a sensitive pastoral concern, even while his approach is rigorous (encompassing biblical, historical, theological and philosophical methodologies)and comprehensive (not simply defending impassibility, but providing as comprehensive as possible, a Theology of Suffering as well). The defense is undertaken from within a self-consciously Orthodox, Catholic,Thomist, position, offering clarification of the tradition, while at times breaking new grounds in the application of the tradition’s axioms. The stated aims of the work are twofold: 1) To refute erroneous arguments and assumptions that support notions of divine passibility and 2) To present positively, divine impassibility as “more biblically authentic, more historically accurate, more philosophically convincing, more theologically persuasive, and so more emotionally gratifying.” (p. viii)
Outline of Contents
From the beginning, Weinandy situates his work in the context of post-holocaust theological responses to human suffering and surveys the arguments raised by these theologies against divine impassibility. Weinandy sees the persuasiveness of divine passibility theologies as clustering around three headings: 1) The social and cultural milieu of post-holocaust pathos, 2) biblical reflections on the passionate God of the Old Testament, and God incarnate in the New, and 3) philosophical critiques of Greco-Platonic influences on the traditional doctrine of impassibility. Accordingly, much of subsequent chapters are taken up in treating these matters.
Before refuting the arguments and presuppositions of divine passibility however, Weinandy takes a brief excurses in chapter 2 to treat theological prolegomena, rejecting a problem-solving approach for a more proper mystery-elucidating one. Here, he also makes clear what he is arguing for in his central thesis concerning divine impassibility, and what is the notion of passibility that he is specifically denying: “God is impassible in the sense that he cannot experience emotional changes of state due to his relationship to and interaction with human beings and the created order.” (p. 38). This however, “does not imply… that God is not utterly passionate in his love, mercy and compassion.” Accordingly, the notion of divine passibility that is denied in the study is “that God experiences inner emotional changes of state, either of comfort or discomfort, whether freely from within or by being acted upon from without.” (p.39)
Chapter 3 is taken up with the Scriptural presentations of God in the Old Testament, revolving around questions concerning God’s transcendence and immanence. Weinandy deems that “the notion of God’s transcendence and immanence is pivotal to the discussion of his being impassible or passible.”(p.55) Accordingly, the main burden of this chapter is to demonstrate that the Old Testament never regards the transcendence and immanence of God as antonyms. The revelation of YHWH as “One, Savior, Creator and All Holy” shows rather, that “God is able to be present and active as the Wholly Other, and is present and active only because he is the Wholly Other”. This revelation of God is, Weinandy believes, “the primary, central and pivotal mystery of biblical revelation and of the Jewish/Christian faith.” (p.53) Laid out in more philosophical terms, “While there is an epistemological priority in the manner in which God is known and an ontological priority in the manner in which God is, and so can be known, the God who is transcendent is the same God who is immanent and vice-versa”. (p.42) This being the case, the instances in Scripture which contain possible suggestions of change or passibility in God are to be read as anthropomorphisms, and not as suggestions that God is simply ethically, but not ontologically, impassible.
Chapters 4 and 5 proceed to deal with matters concerning the Patristic Doctrine of God. Weinandy moves briskly but sure-footedly through the New Testament and Early Christian bridges to a more extended treatment of Patristic writings with a single aim in mind: to demonstrate that contrary to popular and even scholarly caricatures, the Fathers did not ingest Greco-Platonic philosophy hook, line and sinker in their Doctrine of God. The key inoculum in their theological understanding is the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. (p.108-9) Accordingly, the traditional Christian doctrine of impassibility is not to be confused with that of Greek Philosophy, as it so often is, by those who reject divine impassibility. Weinandy points out that the fathers were not so much concerned with defending Greek notions of divine apatheia, as they were with defending the total perfection of God’s scripturally revealed attributes. “In order to accentuate these positive biblical attributes which accrued to God as Creator, the Fathers attributed to him a whole cluster of negative attributes some of which are directly biblical in origin and some of which stem from philosophical reflection. For the Fathers, these negative attributes served a twofold purpose. They primarily were used to distinguish God from the created order, but in so doing they equally gave more noetic content to the positive attributes.” (p.109) “Thus, there is little, if any, ground for the familiar criticism that the attribute of divine immutability transformed, within the teaching of the Fathers, the living and dynamic God of the Bible into the static and inert God of Greek philosophy. The problem is that contemporary critics of the Fathers consistently give to the attribute of divine immutability the positive noetic content of being static, lifeless and inert, something which the Fathers never argued for nor even contemplated. The Fathers grasped, as the contemporary critics do not, that to say that God is immutable is to deny those aspects of his nature – changes of a diminishing or of a developmental kind – which would jeopardize or render less than perfect his dynamic vitality as the one who truly is. While the Fathers may have snatched the attribute of immutability from the Greek philosophical vocabulary and tradition, they radically altered it so as to assert, in a philosophical manner, God’s unconditional goodness and unqualified love as revealed in the scriptures.” (p.110-111)
Discussions in the book thus far have been largely polemic. Weinandy has spared no efforts in demonstrating that passibilist theologies often err firstly, against Scripture, in treating God’s transcendence and immanence as antonyms, and secondly, against history, in treating the Patristic Doctrine of God as unfortunately compromised by Greco-Platonic philosophy. From chapter 6 onwards, the book engages more fully in constructive theology and philosophical defense of divine immutability.
Weinandy deems Chapter 6, which focuses on the Trinity’s loving act of Creation, as the heart of the entire study (p.114). The chapter however, does not seek to address the question of im/passibility directly. Rather, it presents a theological and philosophical account of God and of his relationship to the created and human order, seeking to demonstrate how one can theologically and philosophically justify the biblical claim of God’s absolute otherness while equally and simultaneously maintaining his intimate loving relationship to the world and human beings. The arguments in this chapter certainly place significant demands on its readers, especially for those who may be “theological neophytes”. A helpful summary however, is offered at the end of the chapter (pp.144-146). The key idea that Weinandy wants readers to grasp; “what holds the entire argument of this chapter together, in all of its inter-related components”, is the notion of “act” as it relates to God. (p.145) God as “pure act” (actus purus), has no unrealized potential and hence, is never in the state of change. To be in a state of change indicates that a being still has unrealized potential and is hence not fully in act. Accordingly, the immutability and impassibility of God which arises from His being “fully in act”, arises not from His being in stasis, but conversely, from His infinite dynamism and intense involvement. Hence, God as One (the only One) who is “pure act”, at one and the same time, sets Him apart as Wholly Other, while putting Him simultaneously in absolute relationship with all that is in Creation. This however, is a philosophical explication, and Weinandy does not expound this understanding until he has moved theologically through arguments founded upon the Trinity as Persons in Subsistent Relations, and God as Existence itself (ipsum esse). Weinandy’s Trinitarian argument for immutability/impassibility is an attempt to root the philosophical arguments of the tradition on more biblical-theological grounds. His argument, in its application of the orthodox Trinitarian axioms to the doctrine of Creation towards a defense of divine impassibility, is possibly an original endeavor.
It is clear that Weinandy does not wish to make human suffering the foundation for an understanding of what God is like, but rather, wishes to understand human suffering in the light of who God is. Having hence treated the Doctrine of God in the previous chapter, Weinandy progress on in Chapter 7 to discuss the subjects of “sin”, “suffering” and “God’s love”. The main points of this chapter are clear. 1) Suffering arises because of sin. “Sin, as the source of evil, deprives human beings of the goods proper to being human. It is this deprivation of good which, by necessity, causes human suffering. Human beings suffer because, through sin, they are deprived of their proper relationships with God and others…etc” (p.152) 2) God does not suffer because there is a Creator-Creature distinction and because of the Perfection of God as a Trinity of Persons. (pp. 152-158) 3) God nevertheless, is still the God of love even though he does not suffer, as “suffering is not constitutive of love”. (p.160) How however, is God’s love related to human suffering? Weinandy points us back to the fact that God is always “fully in act” and hence, the divine attribute of love is always fully in act. This re-orientates us to the fact that God’s love is always fully present and active in every situation, in all its various facets. In a sin-tinged creation and existence however, the experience of certain facets of God’s love may involve the experience of suffering in accordance with an individual’s personal situation at any one time. “If a person sins, he or she knows and experiences God’s love as a rebuke and as an admonishment. If the person repents, he or she knows and experiences God’s love as compassionate and forgiving, and so rejoices in his merciful love. If a person suffers due to injustice, he or she knows, in faith and sometimes by experience, that God’s loving-kindness and consolation are present.” “Thus God is perfectly compassionate not because he ‘suffers with’ those who suffer, but because his love fully and freely embraces those who suffer. What human beings cry out for in their suffering is not a God who suffers, but a God who loves wholly and completely, something a suffering God could not do.” (pp.163-164)
Chapters 8 to 10 are taken up with Christology and its implications for a Theology of Suffering. While these are largely still chapters of constructive theology, they do contain a polemic barb. In the first instance, the passibilist theologies of Moltmann et.al., frequently find in the Incarnation and Crucifixion of God in Christ, basis for which to be persuaded that God is ontologically passible. Those who hold to the doctrine of divine impassibility, it is claimed, do not take the cross as seriously as the passibilist do. Weinandy turns the criticism on its head and demonstrates rather, that if we should hold to divine passibility, we end up relativising the Cross and emptying it of its salvific merits and significance for those who are suffering. According to Weinandy, “Many modern theologians are so consumed with championing a God who suffers in himself, that they fail to grasp the full significance of the Incarnation and the transforming effects of Christ’s redemptive suffering.” (p.173) Weinandy asserts in chorus with the patristic fathers, that it is the Impassible who suffers in Christ. This is no incoherent grammar, but an expression of the communication of idioms, through which we maintain the orthodox assertions that 1) It is trulyGod the Son who is man, 2) It is truly man that the Son of God is, and 3) The Son of God trulyis man. It is this orthodox Christological assertion that puts the Son of God who is truly divine and hence impassible, within the reach and range of genuine human suffering as the man Jesus. As Weinandy points out, “This is what humankind is crying out to hear, not that God experiences, in a divine manner, our anguish and suffering in the midst of a sinful and depraved world, but that he actually experienced and knew first hand, as one of us -as a man – human anguish and suffering within a sinful and depraved world.” Conversely, for those who advocate a suffering God, “the Incarnation is still a scandal, for, while with the best of intentions, having locked suffering within God’s divine nature, they have, in so doing, locked God out of human suffering.” (p.206) Weinandy goes on to show in chapter 9, how the human suffering of Christ has redemptive significance for those who are suffering, and rounds up the work in chapter 10 by relating how God’s answer to human suffering, is the person and work of Jesus Christ, now mediated through the mission and ministry of the body of Christ which is His church. The polemic edge of these ending chapters are summarized earlier in p.173 “…because much contemporary theology has failed to recognize the christological and soteriological significance of Christ’s suffering, it has in turn failed to grasp the unique ecclesial significance of suffering, that is, that those who now suffer in Christ, as members of his body, suffer and experience suffering in a radically different manner than those who have not come to faith in him. The Father’s response to sin and evil, and the suffering that flows from it, is Christ, and only those who fully live in Christ share fully in the Father’s response. Thus the singular evangelistic import of Christ’s suffering, within a tortured world which cries out in hopeless anguish, is completely lost.” (p.173)
Brief Response
It is difficult to do proper justice to the intricate and exquisite contours of Weinandy’s treatment in a summative review of his work. The constructive sections of the book contain an admirable demonstration of how systematic theology can and should be done: going beyond propositional proof-texting or logical bull-dozing, to demonstrations of how a specific dogma arises out of, and is necessitated by, its organic relation with the nexus of other central tenets of Christian belief. Here, we find an attempt at stating beliefs, not only in demonstration of their veracity, but also in expression of their beauty and exhibition of their existential coherence.
The treatment of Patristic Theology and exonerative exposition of Aquinas is also a welcome and necessary corrective to prevailing caricatures. Perhaps the grand achievement of the work consists in its successful demonstration that the tradition’s Doctrine of Divine Impassibility cannot be rejected and overturned on the claimed basis that it is philosophically compromised, theologically inadequate, and emotionally unsatisfying. The tradition’s doctrine is shown to be adequate in these respects and hence, if one seeks to move away from its consensus, the burden of proof lies on the passibilists, to find more adequate reasons for seeking to offer an alternative account, to one that has served orthodox Christianity well for nigh two millennia.
The case for closing the lid on reflections concerning God’s im/passibility may however, yet be premature. This is by no means due to any serious flaw in Weinandy’s able, articulate and affective exposition of divine impassibility. Rather, it has to do with the fact that while Weinandy has successfully put a nail on passibilist caricatures of the traditional doctrine of impassibility, he often however, paints those who seek to give the matter of divine passibility more serious thoughts, with too broad and flat a brush. For instance, not all who reach the conclusion of divine passibility do so because they seek to solve problems rather than elucidate mysteries as Weinandy suggests in p.36[1]. As a case in point, R.W. Jenson, whom Weinandy footnotes in p. 27 as a theologian whose theological prolegomena is very compatible with the mystery elucidating one which he espouses, is in fact a passibilist. Hence, while the reminder on adopting a proper prolegomena is helpful and necessary, it is a non sequitur that all passibilist theologies fall into this error and are hence to be rejected.
Further, there might be hermeneutical reasons why we should not be too quick to seal the box on the question of divine passibility. The issue that is really pertinent in chapter 3 is the question as Weinandy puts it: “Have I shown, from biblical evidence, that God is ontologically immutable or ethically immutable? . . . I obviously have been arguing for the former, and I have been arguing for it from within a biblical setting.” (p.61) If Weinandy’s main purpose in this chapter is specifically to argue for ontological immutability from within Scripture, his analysis does not seem to have done so conclusively. This is because, all that has been successfully shown from his analysis, is that the axiom of divine immutability can be demonstrated to be coherent to Scriptural revelation if one employs a hermeneutic of anthropomorphisms when reading texts that indicate divine passion and change. He has not however, really demonstrated that Scriptural revelation necessitates an understanding of ontological immutability in God. This is so as Weinandy’s hermeneutic, is rooted in axiomatic presuppositions concerning divine immutability, and not necessarily necessitated by Scripture itself. All that Scripture demands, as Weinandy successfully demonstrates, is that God be known as ontologically and ethically “other”. The move from divine “otherness” to ontological immutability and impassibility however, requires a logical step to be taken; one that is justified axiomatically and not directly drawn from Scripture itself, as Scripture does not engage in such philosophical reflection and statement. Weinandy recognizes this, but assumes nevertheless that “From within biblical revelation…the immanence of God takes epistemological precedence…[but] it is his transcendence which takes ontological precedence.” (pp.41-42) This subsequently shapes his reading of the OT narratives, allowing him to make the logical move from “holy otherness” to “ontological immutability and impassibility”.The problem here however, is that he has arbitrarily given ontological status to divine transcendence, but not to divine immanence, and one may validly question why this should be the case, especially given the simplicity of God’s being. Passibilists may validly ask if we should not take Scriptural statements about God’s “regret” as literally as we do when we encounter those concerning God’s utter “un-changeability”.[2]