The God Who Feels

And when the angel stretched out his hand toward Jerusalem to destroy it, the LORD relented from that calamity and said to the angel who was working destruction among the people, “It is enough; now stay your hand.” . .    2 Samuel 24:16  ESV

Relented  – Sometimes you have to know the history of a doctrine in order to understand how it affects your thinking about God.  And sometimes when you know the history, you are so shocked that you simply cannot believe what the doctrine teaches.  Impassibility is one of those doctrines.  Impassibility is the doctrine that God cannot feel emotions.  The doctrine does not say that God does not feel emotions.  It says that God is not the kind of being who can feel.  His being is so far above and removed from the ordinary trauma of life that He logically (absolutely) cannot feel what we feel.  This doctrine is the direct result of another doctrine – immutability – the idea that God cannot change, that His essence is such that it is not possible for Him to change.  And all of this is based on an idea about perfection, that is, that a perfect being is not subject to any additions or subtractions from who He is and is therefore immune to all feelings.

Abraham Heschel notes, “while Parmenides did not explicitly identify being with God, his theory of absolute being and its predicates was again and again adopted as a basis for philosophical theology.  Most speculation on the nature of God held unchangeableness to be an essential attribute.   The principle that change is incompatible with true being has led to what Sextus Empiricus called ‘the dogma of the philosophers that the Deity is impassible.’  The Deity is thought of as a Being who abides in absolute calm.”[1]

Of course, if this doctrine is true, then we are all fooled and foolish.  Our experience that God knows how we feel and that He Himself identifies with our feelings is pure fiction, carefully crafted to make us feel better but in actuality completely inaccurate.  And it makes no difference if we suggest that “Jesus” feels what we feel but God doesn’t have to.  That only complicates the problem.  If this doctrine is true, we have no idea about God’s real identification with us.  You might say, “Well, we just reject this doctrine.”  If it were only that simple.  Rejecting this doctrine puts enormous pressure on the whole idea of immutability.  It suggests that God actually changes – in feelings and will.  And that begins to undermine the entire idea of the Christian theology of God.

This verse is only one of several that demonstrate the problem.  Here the Hebrew word naham means “to be sorry, to repent, to regret.”  It is a paradigm word about feelings!  In fact, the verse makes no sense at all if God does not feel.  As TWOT states, “On the surface, such language seems inconsistent, if not contradictory, with certain passages which affirm God’s immutability.”  The answer?  “ . . . the expression is anthropopathic and there is not ultimate tension.  From man’s limited, earthly, finite perspective it only appears that God’s purposes have changed.”[2]  Really?  Isn’t that convenient?  The biblical text fools me into believing that God actually feels something but the theologians help me understand that I have been duped by the text and that God really doesn’t feel anything at all.  What a relief!  The God of philosophy prevails.  But this raises only one more question.  If I have been fooled by this text, how do I know that I haven’t been fooled by all the other ones?

Topical Index:  impassibility, immutability, naham, repent, relent, 2 Samuel 24:16

If you are really interested to discover just how much these Greek philosophical ideas have influenced your thinking about God, read my book God, Time and the Limits of Omniscience.