If the impassible God
is truly such that He cannot be influenced by anything external, it seems quite
difficult to understand how such a God could have wrath. God’s wrath, just like
His love, should be uninfluenced and nonresponsive to creatures. Otherwise, the
impassible God will be dependent on creatures for how He feels. This problem
for classical theism can be articulated as follows:
1) God has the emotion
of wrath
2) If God’s wrath is
caused or influenced by creatures, then God’s wrath is dependent on creatures.
3) God’s wrath is
caused or influenced by creatures.
4) Thus, God’s wrath
is dependent on creatures.
. . . (1) is a major
biblical theme. (R.T. Mullins, God and Emotion [Cambridge Elements Philosophy
of Religion; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020], 53)
One option for the
classical theist is to deny (1) because it lacks nuance. The classical theist
can say that God does not literally have the emotion of wrath. Instead, she can
say that God metaphorically has wrath. This move, however, faces two
difficulties. First, the overwhelming biblical data on God’s wrath does not
seem to be merely metaphorical. Second, the task of describing what is God’s
wrath a metaphor for.
I’ll start with the biblical
data. The Bible clearly portrays God as being angry, and experiencing the
negative affect of wrath. Psalms 7:11 says: “God is a righteous judge, and a
God who feels indignation every day.” It seems fairly obvious that the feeling
of indignation is incompatible with the perfect blessedness of classical
theism. Thus, the classical theist will have to say that this indignation is
merely an anthropopathic description of God. She will have to say that passages
such as Psalm 7 do not literally describe God’s emotional life, but instead
somehow really teach God’s impassible wrath. What the impassible wrath looks like
will be discussed in the next subsection.
To be clear, the
classical theist will have to explain away every instance of divine wrath in
scripture as anthropopathic. The passibilist will complain that this is quite a
lot of scripture to explain away. The classical theist has to explain away
over 400 passages that would be much more naturally interpreted along passibilist
lines. Given that divine suffering is another major theme in scripture, a
passibilist will say that there simply is no biblical justification for
interpreting all of the wrath passages as anthropopathic . . . The next
difficulty that this strategy faces is developing an account of divine wrath as
a metaphor. What would these divine wrath passages be a metaphor for? Some classical
theists say that these biblical passages are a metaphor about God’s underlying
moral principles for judging sinners and saints without any perturbation in God’s
bliss. Unrepentant sinners experience God’s love as if it were wrath,
but wrath is not actually an attribute of God. This gives us a metaphorical strategy
to consider.
Marshall Randles
adopts a metaphorical strategy. Randles says that the biblical phrases about
divine wrath must be taken in a way that does not carry any meaning that would
conflict God’s pleasure at the prevalence of right against wrong. Randles says:
“[T]here is a sense in which He must have satisfaction in His condemnation of
sin, and overthrow of its power” (Marshall Randles, The Blessed God:
Impassibility [London: Charles H. Kelly, 1900], 40). Randles maintains that
we cannot take this to mean that Gods perfect happiness is in anyway disturbed.
Instead, he claims that we should take these biblical phrases about God’s being
agitated to indicate the moral principles by which God is actuated toward
offenders. He also describes God’s wrath as the disposition of a moral ruler to
condemn or punish (Randles, 40-1).
At first glance, this
might seem to be consistent with impassibility because Randles has maintained
God’s undisturbed happiness. However, Randles has said that the biblical claims
about God’s emotional life should be understood as “the moral principles by
which He is actuated towards offenders, rather than passionate feeling. But
whatever of feeling may be intended, it can imply nothing contrary to infinite
happiness” (Randles, 41-2). Consider this statement carefully. God is actuated
towards offenders. This is not obviously consistent with divine
impassibility. To be actuated is to be motivated by something. In this instance,
it would seem that Randles is saying that God is motivated by sinners to perform
certain actions. Yet, divine impassibility says that God cannot be subject to
any influence from anything ad extra to the divine nature. As the
classical theist, James E. Dolezal, reminds us: “Our sins, be they ever so
many, have no effect on God” (James E. Dolezal, “Strong Impassibiity,” 23).
Thus, Randles’ statement is not consistent with divine impassibility. He has not
escaped the argument because he is still affirming (3) in a sense that allows
the argument to move forward. His interpretation of the biblical passages still
leads to a God who is causally influenced by His creatures to act in a certain
way—that is, to metaphorically have the emotion of wrath. Thus, Randles’
interpretation has not escaped my argument against impassibility. (Ibid., 53-55; the rejection of the "plain meaning" of the 400 passages speaking of God's wrath/anger is a rejection of the perspicuity of Scripture, an important "building block" of the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura)
