Divine Impassibility

I was recently asked if I had any thoughts on divine impassibility. I haven't studied the doctrine that much. Here is a quote from Clark on the subject:

Does the Bible indicate that God is subject to sudden, involuntary, non-intellectual upheavals in his usually calm state of mind? Well, hardly. The Westminster Confession, the best summary of the contents of the Bible, says that God is without parts or passions. Parts refers to bodily organs. Bodies have parts, minds do not. But God is also without passions. The word passion, in more modern terminology affection, is wider than the term emotion but includes the latter. A passion or affection is the result of being affected by some external force. A dog is affected by a whipping; a student is affected, sometimes, by the possibility of a good grade. There are modern psychology books written about “the affective consciousness.” But God is not affected by anything. Of, in another translation of the Greek term, God does not “suffer” anything. 

On the contrary, not only the Westminster Confession, but all or nearly all the historic creeds says that God is immutable. He does not change. Emotion, however, is a sudden, involuntary change. To have emotions would be inconsistent with God’s eternal state of blessedness. 

Now, someone may say that God loves and that love is an emotion. But with respect to love, two points must be made. First, God’s love is eternal, therefore not a sudden change, therefore not an emotion. Second, God commands us to love him. A command requires voluntary obedience. Therefore the love God commands is volitional, not emotional. Doubtless God commands the impossible. He commands us to keep his law perfectly. This we cannot do because of sin. The impossibility arises from us; it does not arise from any irrationality in the commands. God commands the impossible, but he does not command the absurd. (Gordon Clark, Today's Evangelism: Counterfeit or Genuine?)

A few scattered thoughts:

1. Given that emotions are involuntary, I don't think emotions can be intrinsically sinful, although their presence in a particular context could serve as an indication of sin. Jesus was sinless yet, at times, angry, happy, and sad. If we suppose someone else was happy when Jesus would have been angry (with money changers) or sad (at Lazarus' death), or if we suppose someone else was angry or sad when Jesus was happy, then it would seem emotions are a kind of contextually indicative reflection of one's current state of sanctification. Either way, any argument for the impassibility of God couldn't proceed along these lines.

2. If a "passion or affection is the result of being affected by some external force," then God could not be necessarily be affected by anything external to the Trinity, for there is nothing external to the Trinity which was not created. So if divine passibility could be true, it would have to be a contingent property like divine creator-ship.

[I am assuming here that the relationships among the members of the Trinity are necessary, eternal, and, thus, not of the sort intended to be included by a doctrine of divine impassibility. The Father, Son, and Spirit are distinct, eternal generation and spiration are true, and so some might be tempted to say that the members of the Trinity "affect" one another, for example - whether in respect of person or merely personhood is a matter of dispute between eastern and western Trinitarian models - but I would assume that necessary condition for passibility is change, which obviously does not take place given that the Trinity and their relationships are eternal, at least apart from consideration of a contingent creation (i.e. the ontological vs. economic Trinity)].

3. I believe creation is contingent so as to avoid, roughly, the consequence that the Trinity depends on creation in the same sense the Father depends on the Son. However, I think that most proponents of divine impassibility do not think that the fact that we can affirm contingent truths about God like "God is our creator," "God is our savior," etc. would count as a mark against divine impassibility - they may not even count as a mark against divine immutability. At the very least, those contingencies are true in virtue of God's own initiative.

Furthermore, as a Calvinist, I believe God determines all things. God initiates and determines changes, so only in a proximate sense could I say that something external to God has affected Him (not that I would say that). It may affect Him, but only insofar as God had taken the initiative in determining to create something external to Him for that express purpose. So one question is whether God created with a purpose, in part, that His creation would affect Him - change Him, in some way. It may be that God did not create with this intention and so did not determine that creation would affect Him - obviously, this would be in favor of divine impassibility.

But suppose He did create and determine all things with that intention. Another question is, given that any alleged affectation would ultimately derive from God's own initiative and determination, whether that alleged affectation can really by ascribed to something external to God, or if it is really God who is changing Himself. The latter might be the more accurate expression of the state of affairs. This could constitute an argument for divine impassibility, but it would be controversial.

Suppose I intend and determine to hit myself with a hammer and that nothing could stop me from doing so. Was the hammer instrumental to the change in pain I feel? Yes. But the hammer can has no instrumentality apart from my will. So was it the hammer that really affected me, or was it my will, or was it both? If the first or last option, that cuts against divine impassibility. If the second, that works in its favor. An answer to this could depend on the semantics and technical nuances of a particular expression of divine impassability. I'm not sure.

Of course, this all assumes the speculative point about whether God intended that creation would lead to some kind of internal change or affectation in the first place. But to my mind, the Incarnation seems to correspond to the hammer illustration: who and what I am allows me to be able to assume a hammer in my hand by which I can hurt myself. Indeed, the Incarnation is even stronger than this analogy, for whereas I cannot in fact create a hammer, the assumption of a hammer is not an assumption of a nature or capacities, and other things can prevent me from hurting myself with it, the Son in fact initiated and infallibly determined His own Incarnation and assumption of a nature or capacities precisely so as to be hurt through the crucifixion. So the questions about whether I am being really affected by the hammer, if I am affecting myself, or both would have analogous correspondents to the situation of the Incarnation.

4. Direct arguments for divine impassibility could be made from other alleged divine attributes. Divine simplicity would entail divine impassibility. Given that there would be no real distinction between impassibility and simplicity, then it is trivially true that any argument for divine simplicity would be an argument for divine impassibility. I have numerous reasons for disagreeing with divine simplicity, however, so to the extent that I agree with divine impassibility, I wouldn't look here.

Another direct argument for divine impassibility is to argue for divine immutability. Divine impassibility may not require divine immutability per point 3 above, but if God doesn't change, then obviously nothing external to Him could be said to change Him. Ultimately, what grounds our belief in something about God ought to be divine revelation, but our support can be either explicit or implicit. I'm sure others are more aware of relevant biblical passages than I am.

Currently, I am sympathetic towards divine immutability and, to that extent, sympathetic towards divine impassibility as well. I am undecided, however. Obviously, an adherent of divine immutability must consider the relevancy of the Incarnation. Unless I were to encounter incontrovertible, unambiguous biblical support for a specific theory and expression of immutability or impassibility - I may have done so and just don't remember, or I may have and just think (correctly or not) that those texts are prima facie consistent with varying positions - I would need to develop my views on the Incarnation and a theory of time before I could answer decisively.

Emotions and Propositional Correspondence

A few posts ago, in the course of rejecting any sort of metaphysical monism, whether mental or propositional (idealism) or corporeal or physical (physicalism), I mentioned that things-in-themselves can correspond to propositions:

I think a better definition would be that a person is an ego, the possessor of a mind or minds capable of reflexive indexation. These words could each be defined and each definition could be true without its being the case that some “real” Ding-an-sich can’t correspond to them. I think the so-called empirical representational theory of truth in which truth images the physical reality to which it merely corresponds scared Clark away from any type of correspondence – hence the seeming propositional monism.

See here as well:

Metaphysically, Scripturalism does not necessarily promote a purely mental realm. Propositional truth, however, maintains a logical primacy over a “physical” realm insofar as the latter is a creation patterned after the former. The physical qua physical cannot be “known” by definition; knowledge is propositional belief in which the possibility of error is precluded. In other words, this is a sort of opposite to the correspondence theory of truth; it is a correspondence theory of corporeality in which the physical provides a sensible representation of eternal truth. 

While the priority of the correspondence is a question worth exploring - are [some] propositions true because they correspond to some metaphysical thing-in-itself, or are some [and especially physical] things-in-themselves “real” because they correspond to some truth? - these questions about theories of truth and the relationship between epistemology and metaphysics are obviously quite intricate. A little too intricate for this post. I’ve stated some thoughts on the former elsewhere (here and here, for example). For now, I’ll content myself with yet another shot at the idea Christianity is compatible with propositional monism. Given the necessity of knowledge (see here and here), it seems clear that it would be the only type of monism which would’t prima facie be necessarily self-defeating. 

But take emotions. What are they? Gordon Clark defined an emotion as “something unusual, sudden, exceptional...some kind of upheaval...involuntary...has no intellectual content...not volition” (cf. Today’s Evangelism: Counterfeit or Genuine, pgs. 18-19). Obviously, in the course of defining an emotion, Clark uses propositions. But equally apparent is his belief that emotions are not propositional. He says “knowledge and the emotion are different.” 

Now, how compatible this is with his statement on pg. 15 that these non-intellectual, non-voluntary “are not always good. Sometimes they are sinful” is a matter of debate. If the command to emote would indeed be irrational as Clark says on pg. 21, then it would seem emotions themselves cannot be sinful. But if Clark’s definition is acceptable, then I see plenty of room for discussion about correspondence between propositions and things-in-themselves. Metaphysics wouldn’t collapse into epistemology, at least not in toto. On the other hand, if emotions are taken to be propositional, I think that in addition to the question of whether emotions could be commanded and obeyed, such would make it much harder to defend anthropopathic language in Scripture and, by extension, divine impassibility.

Clark's Lectures 5

I was fortunate enough to go to New York this past weekend and obviously wanted to see the public library, but I had no idea I'd discover that they had a copy of Gordon Clark's thesis for his doctorate at UPenn. Unfortunately, it was only a fragment of it, as the rest of the pages seem either to have been torn or fallen out at some point - there were perhaps 20 of the original 50 pages. Nevertheless, what I read impressed on me how much Clark must have developed his personal philosophy over time, even though it was obvious that Clark then was an able philosopher, fluent in multiple languages and ancient philosophies. At any rate, it was a pleasant surprise to find it, and I hope others will enjoy these few points he made that I transcribed:

History, Textual Criticism, and Skepticism

The opening sentence to his thesis was as follows:

Page 5: "Save us, we pray, from those who have so entombed themselves in the dark and damp of antiquity that they no longer appreciate the light of the present day; but save us all the more from those who go blithefully on their way in utter disregard of the lessons the past can teach."

The point of his poetic remark is well-taken but, if taken strictly, is stated a little imprecisely. The past doesn't teach. Its utility lies in its capacity to occasion ideas in our minds as to what is truth. I think I have addressed this issue here, but perhaps a further comment on a statement by Clark will be helpful:

Page 10: "In the case of Aristotle we are not dependent on fragments, for we have his complete works; we are perfectly familiar with the usages of his language; the only difficulty is textual and whoever bases a skepticism in textual criticism asserts that not only nearly all philosophy, but nearly all history as well, before the Renaissance, it forever unknowable. This is a reductio ad absurdem. We can with tolerable certainty ascertain the exact working of Aristotle, but to understand his thought we need also to know the arguments and discussion of previous arguments men which were the motives to his solution. Are these unknowable? My answer would be, try and see."

I thought it was ironic that Clark should have logically followed the implications of textual criticism so closely only to derive a conclusion opposite to what should be drawn from his philosophy of Scripturalism, viz. it is indeed the case that nearly all history is unknowable, since textual criticism often presupposes an empirical methodology. This is not a reductio ad absurdem to the individual who believes that man is efficiently illumined by God, though not necessarily apart from experiential stimulation. Of course, it would be silly of me to heavily criticize a man's early writings when it is that man whose theology I consider myself occasioned to be so indebted.

The Thesis

The purpose of his thesis, Empedocles and Anaxagoras in Aristotle's De Anime, was to determine how trustworthy Aristotle was in his historical interpretation of the philosophies of his forebears', with particular attention to Aristotle's treatment of Empedocles and Anaxagoras. He was well aware that his conclusions were tentative due to the focused nature of his thesis, but he believed that similar studies would solidify his generalizations:

Page 6: "What would be necessary for the final verdict on Aristotle would be a series of such theses, treating each philosopher referred to in each of Aristotle's works. Only after such an induction could generalizations be made. But how easy it is to anticipate the generalizations without going through the induction is perhaps only too well illustrated in the following pages."

Page 7: "The firm belief in the final truth of his own system led him to examine others through Aristotelian spectacles."

Page 46: "It appears, therefore, even in the little so far covered that A. is as trustworthy as any historian can be expected to be."

It is too bad that the majority of the pages between these last two statements were missing, as it is otherwise difficult to reconcile them. Perhaps he meant that although a historian cannot be trusted as an objective, unbiased source of information, he can be relatively charitable. But at least this shows Clark seemed to recognized a distinction between incomplete and complete induction and that his work falls under the former category.

Theological Statements

As much of Clark's thesis concerned itself with finding out what Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and Aristotle taught, there is less of the author's own opinion than may be desired. But this is proper, and it leaves me with only a few more interesting statements:

Page 45: "Now obviously to argue from a man's theism what his psychology ought to be is rather precarious."

I do not believe Clark would have considered this idea to be so obvious later in his life. But again, Clark was only 26 or 27 when he wrote this, so it is not strange that over the next 55+ years of his life that he would change his mind on a few of his beliefs. He apparently changed his mind on the infinitude of God as well (cf. The Incarnation, pg. 62):

Page 46: "The knowledge of an infinite mind, which is not the result of a learning process peculiar to finite minds, may be compatible with impassibility. Yet the more we insist that God is unchangeable, the less we understand how he recognizes temporal events as having happened or as about to happen."

This last statement is profoundly true, reflecting my current struggle to understand God's immutability in relation to time. As Clark changed his mind, I may very well change mine. But it is good to share a God whose truthworthiness is unchangeable.