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September 28, 2019 - January 28, 2020
“relents,” we should keep the context of each passage in mind. Although in that moment it appears as if God had changed his mind, if we have a bird’s-eye view we see that God is doing what he has promised or intended all along.
God has not changed his mind but fulfilled what he immutably willed from eternity: that Nineveh would be saved!
And also the Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man, that he should have regret”
for God is not a human, changing his mind or regretting what he has done.
The language of “regret” is not meant literally but serves as a signal, indicating to the reader not only that God has judged Saul but that God’s plan all along has been to raise up a king after his own heart.
God himself, purposefully use anthropomorphic terms and phrases, communicating something true of God but through categories and images of our finite, human world, and the emotions that define our human experience.
marvel of our God is that he can will change in us, though he himself changes not.
Augustine says, our God is “without any change in himself” as he is “making changeable things,” yet all the while “undergoing nothing.”
so if they are to be trusted, they must swear by the character of something or someone else to reassure the other party that they will keep their word.
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. KATHERIN ROGERS, Perfect Being Theology
There is no guarantee, nor any indication, that these gods have control of their emotions. Instead, they look a lot like us. At times, they are even dependent on us, needing us to fulfill their own happiness, satisfy their discontentment, or satiate their own lust.
such as fear, anxiety, and dread, or greed, lust, and unjust anger.” To say that God is not passible “is to deny of him all human passions and the effects of such passions which would in any way debilitate or cripple him as God.”
But that is not what impassibility means; it is an unfortunate misunderstanding, yet a popular caricature.
Rather, it means that such virtues are not true of God as a result of being acted on by someone or something else. Nothing else and no one else caused such virtues to exist in God.
If his virtues were passions, then he no longer would be pure act.
But we should immediately be concerned about any attempt to humanize the Creator of the universe, reversing the Creator-creature distinction.
Balak learns that day that unlike his pagan deities, the God of Israel is not a God who can be manipulated.
God has accommodated himself to us to such a degree that he has chosen to use our human language to make himself known.
God lisps to us, like a parent or nurse would, using baby talk to speak to a child.
To do this he must descend far beneath his loftiness.”
“If God should speak unto us as he could, according to his own nature,” then we would never be “able to understand him, nor conceive his meaning.”
Chalcedon strives for biblical balance, describing the two as related “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.”
The denial of those four words (confusion, change, division, separation) is crucial.
what has been called the communicatio idiomatum, the communication of proper qualities or properties—yet it is not at the level of nature but at the level of person.
Attributes of one nature are not to be predicated of the other nature but instead should be predicated of the person of the Son.
“taking on a new manner or mode of existence.”
This careful nuance allows us to say, on the one hand, that Christ is impassible as he who is true God, and yet he is passible as one who is true man.
“passible in His Flesh, Impassible in His Godhead.”
“Pay careful attention . . . to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood” (Acts 20:28), and why he can say to the Corinthians, “None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory
There is a tragic irony in the view that says God as God must suffer at the cross.
The person of Christ suffers, but he does so as a man.
As counterintuitive as it may seem, if Christ suffers in his deity at the cross—or the Father suffers with him as he looks on—then we have actually excluded the Son from suffering for us.
the Son of God is going to act on our behalf as our suffering servant, then it is critical that we honor his suffering as truly human.
Even during the incarnation, the person of the Son continues to uphold the universe by the word of his power (Heb. 1:3; Col. 1:15–17).
The Fathers and Reformers called this the “extra.”
“Not even in the hypostatic union is the Word of God or the divine nature comprehended by the human nature.
For that reason, then, the person of the Son remains impassible in his divinity while at the same time truly suffering in his humanity.
If God were passible, would that change the gospel and its promises for the Christian life? Absolutely.
But it does mean that the person of the Son suffers on the cross in the fullness of his humanity.
According to Moltmann, God’s love depends on the creature for its fulfillment.
More than any other attribute, impassibility may be the most counterintuitive to Christians today.
Ultimately, impassibility is so important because it creates an idolatry-free zone.
What wondrous #doctrine of #Theology
[God’s eternity is] the whole, simultaneous and perfect possession of boundless life.
That comment is pure Augustine: humble, never to dismiss a serious theological question.
“They attempt to taste eternity when their heart is still flitting about in the realm where things change and have a past and future; it is still ‘vain’ (Ps. 5:10).”
He is not a God of change, as if he had a past and a future; this God is timelessly eternal, insusceptible to the change that comes with being in time.
Time is fraught with limitations; a being in time is a being bound by all the characteristics of time: change, composition, dependency, and impotence.
#Theology
Timeless eternity is but the child, the heir, of two proud parents: divine perfection and infinitude, who themselves are married to one another and cannot be divorced.
But with God, time is perceived differently. As one who is not bound by time or limited by its count, he sees all time at once.
If so, then God is not strictly eternal but more appropriately everlasting.
