Jeff Chavez’s Reviews > Does God Suffer? > Status Update

The act of creation then is a relation fully in act in that it is only by continuously being related to God that creature exists. (131)

"Thus there is no passion in God, not in the sense that he does not love, but because being pure act, there is no need for an arousal of his will to love the good and so to come to desire the good and rejoice in it." (126)

The Immutability of God as pure act, far being an impairment to creating, is the absolute prolegomenon and, literally, sine qua non for creating. (134)

"...while God is immutable and impassible, this in no way denies that he is equally passionate - even in his anger. Implicit within his teaching is the notion that it is precisely the perfect and unchangeable goodness and love of God that allows him to be perfectly and eternally passionate even in his anger." (Weinandy, 107)

God is then perfect not because He has perfected all his potential, but being ipsum esse, he is perfection itself... God is supremely immutable because He is supremely in act. (123)

"By stating that the persons of the Trinity are verbs and not nouns does not mean that they are not acting subjects or persons... Because the acts (the verbs) that completely define and constitute the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are personal or subjective acts... Within the Trinity the action (the verb) constitutes the subject and the subject is a verb - the action by which he is so constituted." (119)

"Anger, when applied to God, was not seen as a separate passion or an intermittent emotional state within God, but constitutive of his unchanging perfect goodness and providential care, and so must be predicated of God in a manner suitable to divine nature." (111)

"God's immutability and impassibility only tell us what God is not. His passionate love, compassion and goodness tell us what God is. However, we apprehend these, not by reason, but 'by divine grace, and by the Word alone that proceeds from him.'" (96)

"...the Hebrew scriptures portray Yahweh as the All Holy Creator and Savior. As such he is wholly other than all else that exists, and yet, precisely because he is the Creator and Savior, he is present to the created order and active within time and history." (69)