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His supreme nature, says Anselm, “is the good without which there is no good.”15 If we return to the distinction between God’s incommunicable and communicable attributes, God’s aseity means he is the source of each communicable quality in his creatures.
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.
The nature of the Trinity is called simple, because “it cannot lose any attribute it possesses” and because “there is no difference between what it is and what it has,
God’s attributes are not external to his essence, as if they added a quality to him that he would not otherwise possess.
“God has no properties but is pure essence. . . . They neither differ from his essence nor do they differ materially from each other.”2
“composed of parts,” he remarks, then it cannot be “altogether one.”
God is identical with all that he is in and of himself.
But here is what is so unique about God: he is without parts. And as a God without parts, he has no composer.
The world, on the other hand, does have parts and must be composed. It is neither self-existent nor self-sufficient.
“infinitely simple, hath nothing in himself which is not himself, and therefore cannot will any change in himself, he being his own essence and existence.”
To elaborate, each person being fully, wholly God, not partially God, means that God remains indivisible in his essence.
eternal relations of origin or personal modes of subsistence: paternity, filiation, and spiration. The Father eternally generates the Son (paternity and filiation), and the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son (spiration).
eternal relations of origin
But then God says something remarkable: “For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed” (3:6). God’s faithfulness stems from his nature. It is because he is immutable in essence that his works operate immutably as well. He does not change in who he is (his essence); therefore he does not change in what he says and does (his will).
are two common objections. First, if God is immutable, then he must be inert, static, immobile,
“God is unchangeable not because he is inert or static like a rock, but for just the opposite reason. He is so dynamic, so active that no change can make him more active.
God is said to regret having made humans (Gen. 6:6). After King Saul continually disobeys the Lord, God says he regrets having made Saul king (1 Sam. 15:11).
that God is doing what he has promised or intended all along.
So what, then, does God mean when he says he “regrets” making Saul king? His intention is to use an experience humans can relate to in order to communicate his displeasure
Myself, I find the idea of a God who is made to suffer by us, and who needs us to be fulfilled, a depressing conception of divinity.
“If he were determined in his very being by what we do, then we would have no confidence that he, like Zeus, might not as easily destroy us in a fit of rage as weep helplessly over our condition.”
passible. These gods are passible because they are prone to suffer, having passions
impassible, or as one who is without passions. Our God is, by nature, incapable of suffering, and he is insusceptible to emotional fluctuation.
he is capable of being acted upon from without and that such actions bring about emotional changes of state within him.
freely changing his inner emotional state
passibility implies that God’s changing emotional states involve “feelings” that are analogous to human feelings.
“God is impassible in the sense that he cannot experience emotional changes of state due to his relationship
and interaction with human beings and the created order.”
“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 caus...
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To say that God is impassible is to shield him from loss.
“which is immutable and impassible is by nature complete.”
simple, then he must be not only immutable but impassible. A God whose nature is made up of parts is vulnerable to change, including emotional change.
To clarify, it’s not just that God chooses to be impassible; he is incapable of being passible. It is contrary to his unchanging nature.11
If God’s nature does not change, then neither can he undergo emotional change.
To attribute impassibility to God is not to attribute something positive to him but to deny something detrimental to God—namely, change and with it suffering.
Nothing else and no one else caused such virtues to exist in God.17
Because God is eternal and immutable, his virtues are affected and impacted by no one.
Though it may be counterintuitive, impassibility actually protects other attributes like love, because it guarantees that his love will not change or fluctuate.
Impassibility also ensures that his love needs no activation, nor has any potential, as if his perfections need to become something more than they are already.
Rather, as the maximal God his impassibility certifies that he could not be any more loving than he already is. He is love in infinite measure.
For Moltmann, God’s suffering is so deep that it penetrates not merely to his relations with us but into his very being, his essence, his nature.
That God suffers at Golgotha means that his being should be “understood as open vulnerability,” for “God’s being and God’s life is open to true man.”
What are we to make of this popular cultural commitment to a suffering God? Is it true that God must suffer to relate to us in a helpful, meaningful way?
Dissolving the Creator-creature distinction, we make God in our own image, resembling our attributes, reflecting our human characteristics and limitations.
While there are ways that we, as those made in God’s image, reflect who God is, we should not jump to the conclusion that God must be like us to know us, relate to us, or help us.
in that moment we do not want someone who changes emotionally or suffers emotional change. We desperately need someone who is impassible;
We could go further and say that only someone who is not overcome by emotion in that moment is capable of acting heroically.
He did not need to suffer at all to be compassionate.
When we describe God as impassible, however, we do not mean to say that it is optional, as if he simply chose, voluntarily, to be impassible given the circumstances.
that he is impassible, and not merely by choice but by nature.39
