The Bipolar God
Thus My anger will be spent and I will satisfy My wrath on them, Ezekiel 5:13a NASB
Will be spent – The biblical God is in serious need of mental health counseling. Just look at the swings of emotion He displays:
Since you are precious in My sight,
Since you are honored and I love you, Isaiah 43:4a
Just as a father has compassion on his children,
So the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him. Psalm 103:13
and My anger will be kindled, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless. Exodus 22:24
Anyone who is subject to these alterations, with divine intensity, must be mentally deranged. Today we would classify Him as bipolar. “Bipolar disorder, formerly called manic depression, is a mental health condition that causes extreme mood swings that include emotional highs (mania or hypomania) and lows (depression).”[1] That sounds like God, doesn’t it? How else can we explain a God who at one moment claims He loves eternally His chosen people and at the next moment swears that He will destroy them all?
Ah, you know the answer, right? These verses really aren’t about God at all. They are about how we view God, not how God really is. They are anthropomorphic. They just describe God in terms that we humans can understand, but they really don’t say anything about the real essence of God.
Maybe you’ve never really struggled with the fact that God claims to be a God of love and at the same time can order the execution of men, women, children, and animals. Maybe you like to hold on to the God who has a wonderful plan for your life while ignoring verses about condemning most of humanity to Hell. Really? Set aside your emotional need to have a divine Father and ask yourself, “What kind of God can create humanity knowing that He will send the vast majority of them to eternal torment?” Does that God sound sane?
Before you go into a manic/depressive state, let’s look at how this became a problem in the first place.
“For more than two thousand years Jewish and later Christian theologians have been deeply embarrassed by the constant references in the Bible to the divine pathos. What were the reasons for that embarrassment? Why did they oppose the idea of pathos? The opposition, it seems, was due to a combination of philosophical presuppositions which have their origin in classical Greek thinking.”[2]
“The very word ‘pathos’ like its Latin equivalent passio, from pati (to suffer), means a state or condition in which something happens to man, something of which it is a passive victim. The term was applied to emotions such as pain or pleasure as well as to passions, since they were understood to be states of the soul aroused by something outside the self, during which the mind is passively swayed by the emotion or passion. . . Such a state was considered a sign of weakness, since the dignity of man was seen in the activity of the mind, in acts of self-determination.
From very early times, it was felt that God could not be affected in such a way. The Deity, the Supreme Cause, could not possibly suffer from, or be affected by, something which is effected by Himself. Passivity was held to be incompatible with the dignity of the divine. . . The Deity is a principle whose very essence is actuality.”[3]
“For Aristotle, as for Plato, knowledge is the highest virtue. The emotions he regards as auxiliaries or impediments to a rational form of life. None of the passions, however, are in themselves bad; they are simply natural, but in order to become ethical they require training. The ethical consists in the restraining of desire and emotion within the limits of the mean through intelligence and discipline. Indeed, while condemning the man who is unduly passionate, Aristotle condemns equally the man who is insensitive.”[4]
“[for Plato] Emotions belong to the animal nature of man, reason to the divine in man. . . It was such preference that enabled Greek philosophy to exclude all emotion from the nature of the Deity, while at the same time ascribing thought and contemplation to it. . . God is nous, the essence of His being is thinking. He is above joy and sorrow.”[5]
“Jewish scholasticism of the Middle Ages agreed with the philosophers on the impossibility of ascribing to God any human qualities in the literal sense. . . Maimonides, accepting the Stoic view that ‘all passion is evil,’ interprets the statements of the Bible regarding God which in their literal sense predicate certain qualities of Him as not describing characteristics of His essence, but as human ways of understanding His works. Thus when He is called compassionate, this does not mean that He feels compassion, but that He works deeds in regard to His creatures similar to those which with us would proceed from the feeling of compassion.”[6]
“Therefore, if we love God, we cannot desire Him to return our love, for then He would lose His perfection by becoming passively affected by our joys and sorrows.”[7]
“ . . . the psychological basis of the Socratic view that virtue is knowledge. Upsetting the harmony of the soul and the self-determination of the mind, emotions and passions are disturbances of mental health, and if indulged in, become chronic diseases of the soul.”[8]
Now you recognize that God’s emotional swings in the biblical texts are not a problem unless you first adopt the Greek-Western view of emotions. If you’ve bought into the idea that the real essence of Man is rationality, and that reason is superior to emotion; if you believe (consciously or not) that emotions are essentially passive and the real goal of Mankind is control, then you will find the descriptions of God in the Bible rationally offensive, that is, incompatible with your philosophy of God. Whether or not you realized it before now, if you have difficulty accepting the biblical depictions of God’s love and wrath, or any of the other polar emotions, then you’re a product of Western thinking. It doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, Jewish, or Messianic. It’s the philosophical paradigm that matters here, not what you say you believe about the Bible.
So, what do you do with God’s “bipolar” swings? Do they embarrass you? Do you accept them with resignation? Or are you shouting for joy that He’s loving and filled with wrath? Just how much of your view of God depends on circumstances instead of Augustine, Calvin, and Luther?
Topical Index: emotion, pathos, bipolar, paradigm, Ezekiel 5:13a
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/bipolar-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20355955
[2] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets: Two Volumes in One (Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Vol. 2, p. 27.
[3] Ibid., pp. 27-28.
[4] Ibid., pp. 29-30.
[5] Ibid., pp. 30-31.
[6] Ibid., pp. 31-32.
[7] Ibid., p. 32.
[8] Ibid., p. 33.
