Impassibility

In a recent book on the “suffering of the impassible God,” Paul Gavrilyuk defends the patristic consensus that God is impassible, focusing on the ways that the church struggled to maintain the tension of the incarnation between the God who is impassible and the suffering Jesus who is God. In his Pro Ecclesia review, John O’Keefe notes that impassibility was not a “major preoccupation” of the patristic writers, an observes that it tends to come up in specific settings: “The idea does appear, but more episodically than modern studies would allow. The Fathers tended to enlist notions of impassibility in order to argue that the Christian God was immune from the petty passions characteristic of pagan deities, especially at the popular level.”

O’Keefe ends his favorable review with: “contrary to modern negative assessment of patristic theologies of divine passion, the Fathers actually had a sophisticated and nuanced way of handling the complexity that a robust view of the Incarnation implies. The real problem may be with contemporary theopaschites who risk offering yet a fourth way to dissolve the tension of the Incarnation [i.e., in addition to docestism, Arianism and Nestorianism]: if God suffers directly in his own nature, why would the Incarnation be necessary at all?”