Friday, October 28, 2022

John E. McKinley on Early Christians' Struggle with Jesus' Suffering and Divine Impassibility

  

The problem for Christian theologians is that their affirmation of divine impassibility is difficult to reconcile with the suffering of Jesus, as reported in the New Testament. An example of the difficulty is Origen’s commentary on Matthew, where he explains away the evidence of Christ’s emotions of anguish in Gethsemane. Origen introduces a distinction between being vulnerable to the anguish and actually experiencing it. The state of initial vulnerability to passion, the pre-passion state (προπαθεια), is as if one is on the doorstep of the intense emotional experience. This vulnerable state was distinguished from passion (παθος) as the state experienced after the soul becomes imbalanced and caught by the full emotion of anguished fear. Passion was thought to lead necessarily to being susceptible to sin, which was unthinkable regarding Christ because he was also God. As with Origen, Christian theologians commonly believed that a necessary relation exists between possibility and evil, reinforcing the belief that God incarnate cannot be passible any more than God can be passible. (John E. McKinley, Tempted for Us: Theological Models and the Practical Relevance of Christ’s Impeccability and Temptation [Paternoster Theological Monographs; Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock, 2009], 89; the reference from Origen is that of Commentaria in Evangelium secundum Mattheam [ed. C. and C. Vicentii Delarue, PG 13 [1857]: 1741, on Matt 26:37)

 

Another example is Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius 6.3, where he writes that passions are a diseased condition of the will that tend to sin; Jesus had only a natural sort of passions that are different from those of fallen humanity so he could be passible without also being sinful. (Ibid., 89 n. 29)