I’ve struggled with a concept for years that C.S. Lewis just helped me figure out. It’s the orthodox (lower case “o,” as in, accepted by all churches at all times and in all places) doctrine of God’s impassibility. It’s not popular these days—at least in the West, although I read that the the Eastern Orthodox tradition has always been more comfortable with it. Who knows?
Anyway, to say that God is impassible is to say that God is unchanging. He isn’t temperamental. He isn’t affected by external events. He isn’t controlled by passions. He is, in a way, without passion. The Latin root of “passion” means to suffer.
This says nothing about the Incarnation. Jesus enjoyed or endured different emotions like any other human, as the Gospels report. He suffered real pain and anguish on the cross—more than anyone, I imagine. This is why we refer to the events leading up to and including the cross as Christ’s “Passion.” God’s impassibility, by contrast, applies to God in eternity.
I’ve had misgivings about the doctrine because, for human beings, being passionate means that we feel something intensely, or believe in it strongly, or love it deeply. If God isn’t passionate, does that mean his love, among other attributes, is less than we imagine. Worse, is he vaguer, more ethereal, less substantial than his Creation?
Quite the opposite, Lewis writes.
[W]e (correctly) deny that God has passions; and with us a love that is not passionate means a love that is something less. But the reason why God has no passions is that passions imply passivity and intermission. The passion of love is something that happens to us, as ‘getting wet’ happens to a body: and God is exempt from that ‘passion’ in the same way that the water is exempt from ‘getting wet’. He cannot be affected with love, because he is love. To imagine that love as something less torrential or less sharp than our own temporary and derivative ‘passion’ is a most disastrous fantasy.[†]
† C.S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: HarperOne, 1996), 148.