← Doctrine Matters with Kevin DeYoung
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Hello, I'm Kevin DeYoung, pastor at Christ
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Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, and you are listening to Doctrine Matters. Each week on Doctrine Matters, we explore the rich doctrine of the Christian faith.
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We'll pull from the church's long history,
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complex debates, and over the course of the year, the hope is that we'll begin to frame out what is a clear, accessible, systematic theology, be looking at different Christian doctrines and their relationship to each other.
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And the hope, Lord willing, is we
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will grasp more and more the riches and the beauty of God's Word. Thanks for listening. Let's turn to this week's Doctrine Matters.
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We've been looking at the incommunicable attributes of God, and last week we talked about immutability, infinity, and a couple others, and I gave a little teaser to say something more about impassibility. I want to just spend a few minutes here so we can talk about some communicable attributes, too. In wrapping up this section of Theology proper. Of all of the classic incommunicable attributes of God, this is no doubt the one that has become most controversial that you'll find good Christians, good theologians yet come to this one and question it. Impassibility, in short, means that God does not suffer, that he cannot be acted upon from without. Neither can his inner state change, for better or worse. So you can hear this is very much connected to immutability. There's a line in the Westminster Confession that says God is without body parts or passions, so a passion, meaning that God cannot be acted upon from without. He can never be rendered passive, and it will not do to say, well, right, he cannot be acted upon from without, but perhaps he allows himself or he wills himself to be able to suffer internally. And yet this passibility, that is to think that God suffers, leads to a number of problems. First of all, we can note that it has been the position of the Christian church from the beginning, and not owing to Greek philosophy. Christians were perfectly capable of tweaking, nuancing, disagreeing with Greek philosophy. They were influenced by it for sure. But the early Christians understood that God was unchangeable, eternal, incapable of being acted upon from without or within, and that he could not suffer. And yet at the same time, that to be impassible did not mean he was inert or inactive. It meant that he was entirely active. He's so active, he's pure act, he is always active, active that he cannot be acted upon. And this has been the position from the early Church through Anselm, Aquinas, Calvin, pretty much until Maybe the last couple hundred years has this come under serious attack? Divine passibility would mean that God, if he's suffering with us, is the most miserable of creatures. It would put him on the same ontological level as his creation. He would be in a state of becoming rather than a state of being. And it would mean that in some part he is acting to help us because he is in some need to be set free from his own suffering. And this leads is not, not saying that people who deny impassibility are guilty of process theology, but you can see the steps that lead toward it, that God then is in process as we are. And in order to release himself from this experience of suffering, he must help us. We must understand that God's impassibility is not the same as saying he is lifeless. He does not have emotions in the way we have emotions. Even that language of emotion is 200 years old. And emotion in a human being cannot be separated from physical sensations, from brain waves, and from the release of chemicals and endorphins. And of course, God doesn't have a body. He cannot have emotions like we have. We want to be absolutely clear. The Bible talks all the time about God having, we might say, an emotional life, having affections. So just as we understand intuitively that there are anthropomorphisms, that is, God is described as having a body. He has, you know, in theophanies, he has a hair that's white, like wool. As someone with white hair, I do appreciate that. Or Scripture talks about his head, his right arm, making his enemies a footstool for his feet. And yet we understand that he doesn't really have a body as we have a body. These are ways of describing God. Well, similarly, there are anthropopathisms, that is, describing God in ways that we can understand with human emotions. And yet he does not have emotions like we have emotions. Impassibility maintains the full glory and mystery and condescension of the Incarnation. Think about that line from Charles Wesley's hymn, and can it be, Tis mystery all the immortal dies. There is nothing remarkable about the mortal dying, nothing amazing about the passable suffering. No, the wonder and the miracle of the Incarnation is that God did the most ungodlike thing possible. He suffered and he died. So let's not rip apart that mystery. He had to become man in order that he could suffer as a man. And therefore the God man felt human pain. And by that suffering and death he conquered sin, death, and the devil. For us, two related heresies from the early Church to This doctrine of divine impassibility, one is theopaschetism and the other is Patra Passionism. Theopascatism, Theos, meaning God, Pasco, meaning to suffer. Theopascatism is the belief that God suffered as God on the cross. It was a Christological heresy, saying that when Christ died, the divine nature also suffered because there was no real distinction between the Divine and human nature. So it's a Christological heresy. And then there is Patra Passionism, Petra, meaning Father Passion, there being the word for suffering that the Father suffered along with the Son on the cross. This was a trinitarian heresy. It was a form of modalism that the Father and Son were not distinct persons. So that when the Son suffered, the Father also suffered. There was one God, and He exists as the Father and as the Son, and they do not have distinction, subsistences or modes of being. Long before this official rejection of these two doctrines in the 6th century, though these ideas were considered dangerous. The reason the Incarnation was necessary, and it is so ineffably glorious, is that only by taking on human flesh could the Son of God suffer. The Council of rome back in 382 put it well, if anyone says that in the Passion of the Cross God felt painful and not the body with the soul, which the Son of God, Christ had assumed the form of a servant which he had taken upon Himself. As the Scripture says, he does not think rightly. The doctrine of divine impassibility, that God does not suffer. But we haven't said much about these communicable attributes, those attributes that God shares with us, or we can have in some way as God has them. There are more than a dozen that we could mention. Let me just lump them into three categories. One, we can think of communicable attributes of intellect, that is God's thinking. So here we can talk about his knowledge. We can talk about his wisdom and his truthfulness. That God knows all things, the nature of his knowledge is. Is comprehensive. He knows things as they truly are. Also differs from our knowledge in its extent. We know in part, God knows everything. And God's wisdom. God's wisdom is his ability to use that knowledge and then to apply that to the attainment of his ends in a way that glorifies him most. That's a line from Louis Berkoff. And then God's truthfulness, his veracity. He's his he is different from other so called Gods. He is the true God in that he is truth and he always does and speaks what is true. Those are the attributes of intellect or the thinking attributes, and then a second category, his attributes of will. So if we have thinking, this is God's choosing. And here we rattle off a number of communicable attributes that God is holy. Famously, this is the only divine attribute mentioned in threefold repetition. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts. This refers to the perfection of his ethical character. It also refers to his otherness. So God is holy, God is good. That is, he's the opposite of whatever is harsh, cruel, severe, exacting, demeaning, gruff. God is love. Just because our culture misunderstands this doesn't mean we want to be in any way embarrass. No, we want to trumpet from the mountaintops that the Bible says God is love. And we see this displayed in the sending and the sacrifice of His Son. That's where we see it most plainly, in texts like John 3:16 and Romans 5:8 and 1 John 4:10. We think of God's love often as one thing. But earlier theologians helpfully distinguished among different kinds of divine love. So they spoke of the love of benevolence. That's God's goodwill toward human beings, and then his love of beneficence, God's kind actions toward his creatures. And then the love of complacency. Which sounds strange. That would sound like. Well, that's kind of the worst love, because complacent in our language seems like lazy or sluggish or lackadaisical. But here it means God's satisfactory delight in Himself. That's what is meant by complacency in this older language. He so delights in Himself, in the Son, and in all those who are united to the Son. So if we talk about God as love, we don't mean just one thing. We mean various layers of things. He has love towards all his creatures. He has love in one sense toward all human beings. But in the deepest sense, this love of complacency, he takes delight in us as we are united to His Son, in whom he finds complete satisfaction. God is holy, God is good. God is love. God is gracious, that unmerited favor towards sinners. He is merciful. He is kind to the weak, the weary, the mournful. He is long suffering. Now, we just said there's a metaphysical sense in which we don't want to attribute any kind of suffering to God. But here, long suffering means he's patient, he is slow to anger, he's eager to forgive, and he's righteous. The quality of righteousness can be predicated of God himself in reference to his uprightness, his moral excellence, that he always does what is right. He is completely just. So all of this we can place under the title of his attributes of will. So we have God's thinking, God's choosing. And then we have in this final category, his attribute of power, that is God's doing. Here we think about the famous Omnes. He's omniscient. There is nothing he does not know. He's omnipresent. There nowhere he cannot be. And now in this last category, he is omnipotent. There is nothing he cannot do. That's what we're thinking of here. With the attribute of power, he has unrivaled power. But of course, it's not just raw, unbridled power and some kind of capricious exercise of it. But he is for us. God wills what he wills, and the fact that he wills it because he has power to exercise it. We know that whatsoever he wills will come to pass. There is nothing too hard for God. Our God is in the heavens. He does whatever he pleases. Compared to God, all the inhabitants of the earth, there is nothing. No one can stay his hand. Daniel 4:35 his purposes, his promises never fail, because God's power never falters. We could think of this as his divine sovereignty in relationship also to his divine omnipotence. So he has unrivaled power omnipotence, and exercises that power in control over all things. That is his sovereignty. He works all things after the counsel of his will. He determines the number of the stars. He gives to them all their names. He rules over all the kingdoms of the nations. Power and might are in his hands. No one can withstand Him. That is our sovereign God. God's sovereignty can be hard for some Christians, and we'll have an opportunity to revisit the topic later when we look at the decrees of God. But it is worth remembering here that no attribute of God should be divorced from any other attribute. God's absolute power does not exist independent of his goodness, his love, his mercy, his knowledge, his truth, his immutability, his wisdom. He never exercises his power callously or capriciously. This means with everything we know and have seen about God, of course it is good news that he is sovereign. How could we not want this God to accomplish whatever he purposes? Because all that he purposes is wise and true and good and righteous and just. The good news in God doing whatever he pleases, is that God always works for the good of his people and for the glory of his name.
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You've been listening to Doctrine Matters with me, Kevin DeYoung, your host and teacher. If you'd like to learn more about the topics we talked about today, you can check out my book, Daily Doctrine. It's available in print or audio from Crossway.org and you may want to talk to your pastor or a trusted friend who can recommend other good resources. The Doctrine Matters podcast is produced by Crossway, a nonprofit ministry that exists solely for the purpose of proclaiming the truth of God's word through publishing gospel centered content. To learn more, visit Cross Crossway.org until next week. I'm Kevin DeYoung, and this has been Doctrine Matters. Thanks for joining us.