Is God static, or dynamic? Is God a God of ‘feeling,’ or is He a God aloof? Clearly, according to Scripture, God is dynamic. Clearly, according to Scripture, God ‘feels’ and has emotion. But from early on in the Church’s tradition the theologians have felt it necessary, instead, to affirm that God is static and without emotion (i.e. He is ‘passionless’). So, they must opine, when we come across examples in Scripture where it ‘appears’ that God is dynamic and has feeling, that tradition’s theologians qualify such things as anthropomorphisms and anthropopathisms (i.e. attributing human qualities and emotions to God). These theologians had a noble aim in mind; that is to offer a heavy Creator/creature distinction. But ultimately I think they are awry. Jaroslav Pelikan notes this of these theologians:

Whether theologians found Platonic speculation compatible with the gospel or incompatible with it, they were agreed that the Christian understanding of the relation between Creator and creature required “the concept of an entirely static God, with eminent reality, in relation to an entirely fluent world, with deficient reality”—a concept that came into Christian doctrine from Greek philosophy.[1]

This tradition of thinking God in these Hellenic terms carried on through the centuries; indeed many take such thinking to be the standard for thinking God in orthodox terms. Here is an example of how this impacted the theology as far removed from the Patristic period, as Puritan, William Perkins. You will notice this same sort of ‘Greek’ understanding of who God is: “I answer that affections of the creature are not properly incident unto God, because they make many changes, and God is without change. And therefore all affections, and the love that is in man and beast is ascribed to God by figure.”[2] We could enumerate such sentiment by the gazillions if we were to survey all of church history, but these examples and sentiments should suffice.

Unfortunately, such thinking has indeed come to be thought of as ‘orthodox’ by many in the church catholic. I can accept the intention behind this sort of thinking; viz. to honor and emphasize the Creator/creature distinction. But it is unnecessary to simply transpose the Greek thinking about pure being into the cast of Christian grammar without completely disorienting it from its original context (as we have been referring to previously). In other words, I am contending that much of what counts as orthodox theology proper (or doctrine of God) has failed to properly ‘evangelize the metaphysic’ they are deploying for a grammar of God.

God is love. We know who God is as revealed in Jesus Christ. We see God’s face and heart in the face of Christ. In the face of Christ we see a God who weeps, who laughs, who has passion for the world; to the point of assuming humanity and dying on a cross so that humanity might share in the love-life that He eternally is in Himself. Yes, we want to avoid collapsing the inner processions of God into the outer missions in the economy of revelation. But this does not entail that God becomes a God behind the back of Jesus Christ when we get to His processions. While we cannot read all of the aspects of the missions back into the processions, at the same time we must not think the antecedent of God’s life unrevealed is anything less than what is revealed in the actualization of His life for us in Christ.

I’m a Christian, not a Greek. I’m a Trinitarian, not a Monadist. I’m in a love relationship with the God who first loved me that I might love Him. This is as close as I’ll get to subscribing to an analogy of being (selah).

[1] Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of Doctrine and Development: Volume 1 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 53.

[2] William Perkins, God’s Free Grace, 1.723 cited by Ron Frost in, Richard Sibbes’ Theology of Grace and the Division of English Reformed Theology [Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of London, King’s College, 1996], 61-2.