Metaphysics, Mutuality, and the
Suffering of God: An Investigation into the Doctrine of Impassibility and its
Implications for the Doctrine of God
The
impetus for writing this paper is rooted in and ongoing interest in the
historical development of the doctrine of God. More specifically, my interest
is in the problem of metaphysics and its place within a proper construction of
this doctrine. With this concern in mind, a specific problem, which arises from
the presence of metaphysics within the Christian doctrine of God, is a
commitment to divine impassibility. Thus, the purpose of this essay is to
address problems surrounding the doctrine of divine impassibility in relation
to the doctrine of God. Drawing from the theologies of Karl Barth, Eberhard
Jüngel, and Robert Jenson I will suggest that the problem at hand is in direct
relation to an improper metaphysical understanding of the Triune God. What I
mean by this is that the Church’s adherence to a doctrine of divine
impassibility is rooted in a prior—and historically ever present—commitment to
Greek metaphysics over against the witness of the life of Jesus Christ. The
first section of this essay will argue that the consequences of such a
commitment are the development of a doctrine of God conceived in abstracto, the danger of arriving at
a semi-Nestorian division within the person of Christ, and, as a result, the
necessary commitment to a disjunction between the immanent and economic Trinity.
The second section will argue that in order to formulate a proper doctrine of
God one must develop a theological ontology, which incorporates the history of
Christ into the very essence of God thereby establishing the suffering of
Christ as fundamentally proper to the Triune life. Moreover, I will show that
proclaiming Christ as the “Crucified God” is not incompatible with a conception
of immutability provided that Christ’s suffering be understood as eternally
incorporated into the Godhead. And in the final section I will address a recent
article by David Bentley Hart on divine suffering.
