Does God Have Emotions? What Impassibility Really Claims

Does God have emotions? Yes. He loves, delights, grieves and sets Himself against evil, and Scripture reports all of it without embarrassment. What the classical tradition denied Him was never emotion as such but passion, a technical word for a state produced in a subject from outside, which rises, crests, subsides and leaves the subject altered. That denial is the whole of the dispute. Jürgen Moltmann argued after Auschwitz that a God who cannot suffer cannot be involved with those who do. Thomas Weinandy answered that a God who can be diminished by His creatures is not God. Both are defending something true. The Many Beings Framework argues that the standoff rests on a single equivocation, and that once the mode of feeling is indexed to the nature of the one who feels, Hosea 11 needs no softening and the divine nature needs no amendment.

Key takeaways

• God has affections; what the tradition denies Him are passions. An affection arises from the will of the one who has it. A passion is caused in him from outside, and leaves him altered.
• Hosea 11 carries both halves of the problem one clause apart. God's heart is changed within Him, and the reason given for the mercy is that He is God and not a man.
• Four positions are live. Moltmann's passibilism, process theology's dipolar God, Weinandy's strict impassibility, and Vanhoozer's remythologizing middle.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism indexes the mode of feeling to the nature. Against Moltmann and against Weinandy alike, the divine affections are real and held whole, met by creatures in sequence as grief, wrath and delight.

What is divine impassibility?

Divine impassibility is the doctrine that God cannot be acted upon or altered by His creatures, and therefore does not undergo emotional states caused in Him from outside. Two questions hide inside the plain one. Does God have emotions, in the sense of bearing real love and grief toward what He has made? And does God feel emotions the way we feel them, as states that happen to Him? The tradition answers the first yes and the second no, which is why two careful Christian sources can contradict each other.

A passion has its origin outside the subject and its terminus inside him. Something happens, and a state arrives that he did not produce and cannot simply decline. An affection runs the other way: it originates in the will of the one who has it and terminates outside him, in the thing loved or hated. Grief that seizes you at a funeral is a passion. Love that you hold toward your children whether or not they are in the room is an affection.

Thomas Aquinas draws the line exactly there. Acts of the sensitive appetite carry a bodily change with them, and so, he writes in the Summa Theologiae (I, q. 20, a. 1), "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." Then the sentence that settles the matter: "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."

Love, joy and delight are in God. Aquinas says so in the middle of the article most often cited to prove the opposite. The confessions are equally careful with their words. The Westminster Confession of 1646 describes God as "a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions." Not without emotions. Without passions.

Volume Four works through immutability and divine interaction at full length.

What does Scripture say about God's emotions?

The biblical portrait of God's emotions is not thin, and it will not be tidied. Its summit is Hosea 11, and the oracle has to be read whole. Verses 1 to 4 have God teaching Ephraim to walk and bending to feed him. Verses 5 to 7 pronounce the sentence of exile. Then:

"How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I treat you like Admah? How can I make you like Zeboyim? My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused. I will not carry out my fierce anger, nor will I devastate Ephraim again. For I am God, and not a man—the Holy One among you. I will not come against their cities." (Hosea 11:8–9, NIV)

Read the reason the text gives. The mercy holds because the One who feels it is not a creature. A human heart in that position would have let the anger run its course, because that is what suffered emotion does. Hosea sets the most humanlike description of divine feeling in the prophets one clause from the strongest assertion that God is not human, and the pairing is the teaching.

The rest of the data is of a piece. Genesis 6 places its most striking line between a verdict and an exception: "The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled" (Genesis 6:6, NIV) stands between the judgment of verse 5 and verse 8, where Noah finds favour. Paul writes, "And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption" (Ephesians 4:30, NIV), though the verse sits inside a list of congregational commands about truth-telling, anger and honest work, and is an ethical instruction before it is a metaphysical claim.

The register runs in the other direction too. Zephaniah closes three chapters of judgment with delight: "The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing" (Zephaniah 3:17, NIV). Isaiah looks back on the Exodus and says, "In all their distress he too was distressed" (Isaiah 63:9, NIV), and a verse later records that the people "rebelled and grieved his Holy Spirit" (Isaiah 63:10, NIV). The Hebrew of verse 9 is contested and no argument here rests on it.

Then the two-word verse. Jesus "was deeply moved in spirit and troubled" (John 11:33, NIV); "Jesus wept" (John 11:35, NIV); "Jesus, once more deeply moved, came to the tomb" (John 11:38, NIV). The tears are real, and they belong to the incarnate Son at a grave He is about to open.

Volume One is free to download and lays the groundwork the later volumes build on.

The case that God suffers: Moltmann after Auschwitz

Jürgen Moltmann's argument deserves better than the brush-off it usually receives. It is not sentiment. It is a charge that a doctrine failed when tested.

The charge runs like this. Classical theism confessed a God who, by definition, could not be touched by what happened at Auschwitz. Not merely a God who chose not to intervene, but a God constitutionally incapable of being affected by it, whose blessedness was complete and undisturbed while the camps ran. A theology that says this has nothing to offer the victims, and worse, it has described a God whose perfection consists in distance from them. Richard Bauckham's survey in Themelios records the motive in Kenneth Surin's words: "It seems possible to justify God ('theodicy') only if he too suffers."

Moltmann's own sentence, from The Crucified God, is quoted by Bauckham at page 222: "a God who cannot suffer is poorer than any man." Dietrich Bonhoeffer had written the line from prison that Bauckham took for his title, "only the suffering God can help" (Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 361). Weinandy records that Moltmann was the first to press Elie Wiesel's account of a boy hanged in the camp at Buna into theological service, arguing from it for a God who suffers in union with those who suffer.

What makes Moltmann more than a protest is the shape he gives it. He does not revive patripassianism, the ancient claim that the Father died on the cross. He locates the suffering in the relations of the Trinity: "The grief of the Father is just as important as the death of the Son" (Crucified God, p. 243), and "We can only talk about God's suffering in trinitarian terms" (Trinity and the Kingdom of God, p. 25). The Father does not die. The Father bereaves. That is a new position, and it answers the charge of modalism that killed the older passibilism.

The price is real. If what creatures do can diminish God's blessedness, then the God offered at the graveside is a God who is also losing, and the mourner is handed company where he asked for rescue. Aseity, God's existence from Himself and dependence on nothing, is spent to buy the solidarity. Moltmann would say the purchase was worth it. The question about God's emotions is whether it was.

Volume Two takes up the problem of evil at the length the question deserves.

Does process theology's God suffer with us?

Process theology reaches the same conclusion about divine emotions by a different road, and pays a larger price on purpose. Its God is dipolar. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, "In God, the physical and mental poles are called the consequent nature and the primordial nature respectively," and the consequent nature "is God's prehensions of the actual processes of the world. Conversely, it is the world's influence on God."

The position turns on that clause. The world influences God. Alfred North Whitehead's phrase from Process and Reality is what most readers remember of the position: God is "the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands." Charles Hartshorne built the fullest defence of it in The Divine Relativity (1948), arguing that a being incapable of being affected could not be the supreme object of worship.

Two things follow that process theologians do not hide. God's concrete experience changes with every moment of the world's becoming, so immutability goes first. And a God whose experience is constituted by the world did not, on the position's main line, create that world from nothing or freely rather than of necessity, and cannot guarantee how the story ends. This is the line that separates process theism from open theism, which keeps creation from nothing and unilateral divine action while agreeing that God is genuinely affected by us. Process theism asks the reader to trade providence for sympathy, and it is honest enough to say so.

Our article on open theism sets out the nearer cousin of this position.

Why the classical tradition denies God passions

Thomas Weinandy's reply, worked out in Does God Suffer? (2000), is not a shrug. Writing in First Things in 2001, he states the doctrine more precisely than most of its critics allow: God is impassible "in that He does not undergo successive and fluctuating emotional states, nor can the created order alter Him in such a way so as to cause Him to suffer any modification or loss." His verdict on the alternative is blunt. "I believe that the entire project on behalf of a passible and so suffering God is utterly misconceived, philosophically and theologically," he writes, and he endorses Ronald Goetz's name for the passibilist turn, the "new orthodoxy," because the shift was carried through with an assurance that no longer argued for itself.

The positive case is about completeness. A passion is a movement from potency to act: to be moved is to have been, a moment earlier, less than you now are. On that reckoning impassibility is a claim about the scale of divine love. God's compassion is not switched on by our misery, and cannot be exhausted by its scale.

Anselm put the difficulty as sharply as any modern critic, and then answered it. In the Proslogion, chapter eight, he writes:

"BUT how are you compassionate, and, at the same time, passionless? For, if you are passionless, you do not feel sympathy; and if you do not feel sympathy, your heart is not wretched from sympathy for the wretched; but this it is to be compassionate. But if you are not compassionate, whence comes so great consolation to the wretched? How, then, are you compassionate and not compassionate, O Lord, unless because you are compassionate in terms of our experience, and not compassionate in terms of your being."

Anselm concedes the objection before answering it, which is more than the passibilists usually credit him with.

The charge that all this is Greek philosophy smuggled into the church has been answered from the sources. Paul Gavrilyuk's The Suffering of the Impassible God (2004) argues that the fathers did not adopt Hellenic apatheia uncritically, but took a series of dialectical turns to safeguard God's voluntary and salvific suffering in the Incarnation. The councils bear him out. The Second Council of Constantinople in 553 affirmed that one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh, while patripassianism, the claim that the Father suffered on the cross, was rejected. The tradition was specifying how God suffers in Christ, not denying it.

The price is in Anselm's own sentence: not compassionate in terms of your being. Pressed to its severest form, the doctrine leaves Hosea 11:8 reporting nothing about God.

The tradition behind this answer is set out in our article on Thomism.

Vanhoozer's middle way: impassible passion

Kevin Vanhoozer refuses both horns, and the two chapter titles in Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (Cambridge University Press, 2010) tell you where he is going before you open them: "Impassible passion? Suffering, emotions, and the crucified God," and "Impassible compassion? From divine pathos to divine patience."

His starting point, as he presents it, is God's communicative action rather than impersonal causality. God speaks, and the speech is the primary datum. Read that way, the divine emotions in Scripture are not states the world produces in God but what God says and does in the drama He is authoring, and the biblical portrait can be taken as meaning what it says without making God dependent on His creatures for His inner life.

It is an elegant settlement. Asked whether God has emotions, Vanhoozer can say yes without qualification, and that buys a great deal. Neither Moltmann's trinitarian suffering nor Weinandy's strict denial is needed to take Hosea at his word. What it hands on rather than resolves is the mechanism. If God's one act is eternal and the narrated feeling is sequential, something has to explain how the second is a true report of the first. Vanhoozer gives a reading strategy where the question asks for a metaphysical account.

More of the argument, in shorter form, sits in the essays index.

How Frame-Indexed Classical Theism answers

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single formal error. It is the Many Beings Framework's position, and its answer to whether God has emotions agrees with Weinandy about the divine nature, with Moltmann about what is at stake, and with neither about the terms.

The framework's grounding is given here at the level of its conclusions. Natures differing in kind entail differing modes of apprehension. God's frame, the Absolute Metaphysical Frame, is atemporal, simple and a se; He possesses the whole of His life in one undivided act. The creature's frame, the Human Finite Frame, is sequential, composite and contingent. The Many Beings Fallacy is predicating a frame-carrying term univocally across the two, and "emotion" is such a term. It is why Weinandy and Moltmann can read the same verse and disagree about what it asserts.

Strict impassibility and passibilism share a premise. Both take creaturely passio, feeling suffered from outside and unfolding in time, to be what feeling simply is. Weinandy, rightly refusing to put that in God, concludes that God undergoes no emotional states at all, so that the grief and relenting Scripture narrates describe the creature's experience of Him rather than anything in Him. Moltmann, rightly refusing to surrender the biblical portrait, concludes that God must therefore be passible; process theology takes the same step and pays aseity for it. The premise neither side examines is the one generating the dilemma, and it is itself a Many Beings Fallacy to assume God cannot have emotions merely because His are not held in the rising and falling progression ours are.

The resolution follows. In God's frame the affections are real and eternally possessed: the whole of His love, His delight, His compassion and His holy opposition to evil, held at once in the one act He is, rather than a sequence of moods the world triggers in Him. In our frame that single fullness is met in succession, as wrath where it meets unrepentant sin, as mercy where it meets repentance, as grief where it meets the corruption of what He loves. The narration is true, because that refraction is the real form in which finite creatures meet the divine affections. And the creature's acts fix real content: had you not sinned, the eternally possessed grief over you would not eternally have been. What your sin does not do is perturb Him.

Hosea 11:9 supplies the framework's own reason, which is why the oracle has been this article's hinge. The compassion holds because the One who feels it is God and not a man. His being uncreated is what secures the mercy rather than what threatens it.

Vanhoozer offers a reading strategy and process theology offers a metaphysics bought with aseity. What FICT pays instead is a falsifiable commitment: it fails if a classical dilemma turns out to involve no frame-carrying term.

Its conclusions are gathered in the statement of the framework.

How the four positions compare

Each position protects something real and pays somewhere.

That four serious answers are possible is not our claim alone. Divine Impassibility: Four Views of God's Emotions and Suffering (IVP Academic, 2019) gathers James E. Dolezal, Daniel Castelo, John C. Peckham and Thomas Jay Oord. This series does the opposite, arguing one position straight through rather than collecting essays that talk past each other.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between affections and passions?

An affection originates in the will of the one who has it and terminates outside him, in what he loves or hates. A passion originates outside him and terminates inside, leaving him altered by something he did not produce. Classical theology denies God the second and affirms the first, which is why the Westminster Confession says God is without passions rather than without emotions, and why Aquinas can write that love, joy and delight are in God.

Is divine impassibility biblical, or is it Greek philosophy?

The charge that the classical account of divine emotions is a Greek import is old and not baseless: apatheia did shape the vocabulary. But Paul Gavrilyuk has argued from the sources that the fathers took a series of dialectical turns to protect God's saving suffering in the Incarnation, and the councils bear this out. The Second Council of Constantinople affirmed that one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh. The tradition was specifying how, not denying that.

Did God suffer on the cross?

The church said yes and then said carefully how. Patripassianism, the claim that the Father suffered on the cross, was rejected, while the theopaschite formula affirmed in 553 confesses that one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh. Moltmann answers in trinitarian terms: the Son dies and the Father bereaves, where strict impassibility and process theology answer very differently. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism holds that the Son truly suffered in His assumed human nature, which is where our article on kenoticism picks up the question.

If nothing can move God, does my sin grieve Him?

Your sin genuinely determines the content of God's affective relation to you. Had you not sinned, the grief over you that God eternally possesses would not eternally have been. What your sin does not do is break in on a prior calm or diminish His blessedness, and the believer gains by that. The God who grieves over sin is not thereby weakened toward the sinner. Volume Four works this through.

Why did Jesus weep at Lazarus's tomb?

Because He is truly human and His friend was dead. John records that He "was deeply moved in spirit and troubled" before He wept, and was "once more deeply moved" as He came to the tomb. Strict impassibility and passibilism both read that scene as evidence for their case. The tears are the tears of the incarnate Son in His human nature, at a grave He was about to open.

Where to go from here

The passibilist and the impassibilist are each guarding something the other one needs. Moltmann is protecting a God who can be spoken of at Auschwitz; Weinandy is protecting a God whose love cannot be worn down; process theology is protecting divine sympathy and paying for it with creation itself. The cost of the standoff has been carried by readers who were told that the most moving chapter in the prophets asserts nothing about God's emotions. Two neighbouring questions are worth your time next: whether God changes His mind, and whether God is a person in anything like our sense of the word.

Volume One, Resolving the Free Will Dilemma, is free to download. Volume Four, Resolving Immutability & Interaction, carries the argument into divine repentance, answered prayer and the emotions of God. The essays index has the rest.

Related reading

• Does God Know the Future? What Each Answer Costs
• What Is Divine Providence? The Doctrine and Its Parts