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Thy Compassions, They Fail Not: Trends in the Modern Literature On Thy Compassions, They Fail Not: Trends in the Modern Literature on Divine Impassibility Nathan Alden Barczi 1 June, 2011 Module V84327: Research Methods and Resources Introduction In recent years, debate has intensified concerning the suffering of God. This essay will argue that in challenging the twentieth-century “new orthodoxy” of a passible God, the recent impassibilist literature has recovered Patristic doctrines of theology in a way that responds to modern concerns of theodicy. I argue that passibilism gained currency due to both tragic events and philosophical currents in the twentieth century, and that it relied on a misconception of the Patristic doctrine of God as captive to Hellenistic, rather than biblical, notions of deity. This assumption has largely been refuted in the past ten years, as a modern impassibilist response has not only reasserted the traditional doctrine of divine impassibility, but argued that it is only a God free from suffering who can save humanity from its own. Background: The Literature Prior to Moltmann Having stood as an accepted article of the faith for nearly two thousand years, the doctrine of impassibility - that God, in his divine being, does not suffer - was challenged in England in the late 19th century,1 developing against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution and given enhanced impetus by the First World War. Early developments were summarized in two reports from the 1920s: B.R. Brasnett’s The Suffering of the Impassible God2 and J.K. Mozley’s The Impassibility of God: A Survey of Christian Thought,3 the latter a work commissioned by the Anglican Archbishops’ Doctrine Commission which summarizes but also sympathizes with the development of passibilist doctrine. As the twentieth century continued, the suffering of God found expression in the work of theologians from additional nations.4 By 1986, Ronald Goetz wrote that “the ancient theopaschite 1 Thomas Weinandy, for instance, cites an 1893 statement by A.M. Fairbarn that “[t]heology has no falser idea than that of the impassiblity of God.” Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), 1. Richard Bauckham exclaims, “[f]or once, English theology can claim to have pioneered a major theological development: from 1890 onwards, a steady stream of English theologians, whose theological approaches differ considerably in other respects, have agreed in advocating, with more or less emphasis, a doctrine of divine suffering.” Richard Bauckham, “‘Only the Suffering God Can Help’: Divine Passibility in Modern Theology.” Themelios 9 (1984), 6. 2 B.R. Brasnett, The Suffering of the Impassible God (London: SPCK, 1928). 3 J.K. Mozley, The Impassibility of God: A Survey of Christian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926). 4 Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life (London: Constable, 1954), published in Spanish in 1912; Nicolas Berdyaev, The Meaning of History (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1939), which originated as lectures in Moscow in 1919-1920; Kazoh Kitamori, Theology of the Pain of God (London: SCM Press, 1966), originally published in Japan in 1946. heresy that God suffers has... become the new orthodoxy.”5 I take this situation as my starting point, as delineated in Jürgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God.6 Late Twentieth-Century Passibilism Two primary forces drove the passibilist literature of the twentieth century. First, it is undeniably the case that meditation on the suffering of God was catalyzed by human suffering of an unprecedented scale. Second, it was undergirded by a rejection of classical notions of God, deemed to be Hellenistic contaminations of biblical theology. Both aspects were firmly ensconced in the literature prior to Moltmann, and both remain in modified form to the present day. The Suffering of God after the Holocaust “The basic problem of traditional theism, with its purely active, impassible God, is the problem of theodicy: how can an all-powerful and invulnerable creator and ruler of the world be justified in the face of the enormity of human suffering?”7 Thus Richard Bauckham explicitly links the study of divine impassibility with theodicy. As he states in his preface to The Crucified God: “...Moltman significantly expands the question of salvation from the traditional concern with sin to encompass also the characteristically contemporary concern with innocent and meaningless suffering.”8 What is at stake here is not merely whether God may be described as loving, but whether love spurs God to suffer in his divine being in order to save humanity. Repeatedly in the passibilist literature, an episode from holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s Night illustrates the problem: “The SS hanged two Jewish men and a youth in front of the whole camp. The men died quickly, but the death throes of the youth lasted for half an hour. ‘Where is God? Where is he?’ someone asked behind me. ... And I heard a voice in myself answer: ‘Where is he? 5 Ronald Goetz, “The Suffering God: The Rise of a New Orthodoxy.” Christian Century 103 (1986), 385. 6 Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (London: SCM Press, 1974). 7 Richard Bauckham, “‘In Defence of The Crucified God,” in The Power and Weakness of God, ed. N.M. de S. Cameron (Edinburgh: Rutherford House Books, 1990), 96. 8 Bauckham, preface to Moltmann, The Crucified God, x-xi. He is here. He is hanging there on the gallows...”9 Having quoted this episode, Moltmann, who spent time himself as a prisoner of war,10 immediately comments: “Any other answer would be blasphemy. There cannot be any other Christian answer to the question of this torment. ... To speak here of an absolute God would make God an annihilating nothingness.”11 Eberhard Jüngel is clearer still on the importance of God’s suffering not only for his character, but for his capacity to save: “God is that one who can bear and does bear, can suffer and does suffer, in his being the annihiliating power of nothingness, even the negation of death, without being annihilated by it.”12 On this reading, God takes into his very being suffering and death, and it must be so for Christianity meaningfully to speak of a saving God who is love: “Were God incapable of suffering in any respect, and therefore in an absolute sense, then he would also be incapable of love.”13 In the wake of the massive suffering witnessed in the twentieth century, then, passibilist theologians argue that “it is inconceivable that one could affirm that God is impassible and deny that God is love, yet remain a Christian.”14 This dilemma marks the passibilist literature; as we will see, an important element of the recent impassibilist response is to challenge its legitimacy. The Plausibly Passible God Merely to explain the rise of passibilism in the last century and a half with reference to suffering is incomplete. Though the twentieth century witnessed tragedy on an unprecedented scale, suffering is hardly a new phenomenon and, indeed, the classical doctrine of divine impassibility flourished 9 Cited in Moltmann, The Crucified God, 283. Weinandy notes the prevalence of Wiesel’s anecdote in the literature on impassibility, citing J. Vanhoutte and Marcel Sarot as listing over thirty examples. He also points out Sarot’s argument that the anecdote is generally misused by passibilists, in the sense that Wiesel’s point was that it was his faith in a loving and just God, and not God himself, that died on the gallows that day. Weinandy, Does God Suffer, 3, n. 10, citing to Marcel Sarot, “Auschwitz, Morality, and the Suffering of God,” Modern Theology 7 (1991): 137-8. 10 Moltmann, The Crucified God, xvii. 11 Moltmann, The Crucified God, 283. See also Paul S. Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 17. 12 Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute Between Theism and Atheism (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1983), 219. 13 Moltmann, The Crucified God, 230. 14 Richard Creel, Divine Impassibility: An Essay in Philosophical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2. during the heights of Christian martyrdom.15 But crucially, the twentieth century was suffused not only with suffering, but with a novel philosophical atmosphere in which the passibilist challenge was made newly plausible.16 In the wake of Kant’s critique of classical metaphysics, first, any theologian attempting to promote a pre-modern, classical understanding of God was certain to face a harsh opposite current. Through much of the twentieth century, theologians who dealt with impassibility were united not only in rejecting the doctrine but in tracing its genesis within Christianity to Hellenistic notions of deity prevalent during the early years of the Church.17 Richard Bauckham, for instance, argues that “the idea of divine impassibility (apatheia) was a Greek philosophical inheritance in early Christian Theology.”18 It is, he argues, an inheritance incompatible with biblical revelation, “adopted without the necessary critical effect of the central Christian insight into the divine nature: the love of God revealed in the cross of Christ.”19 To many passibilists, the trajectory of the twentieth century study of divine impassibility has been one of emancipating God from the shackles of Greek metaphysics, restoring the conception of the God of the prophets - of Abraham and Isaac, not of the philosophers.20 15 See the discussion in Paul L. Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), Ch 3. 16 See Weinandy, Does God Suffer? and James F. Keating and Thomas Joseph White, O.P., “Divine Impassibility in Contemporary Theology.” In Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering, edited by James F.
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