On the Emotional Life and Unchangeableness of God
Statement of Faith
This statement addresses three interrelated questions: whether God can genuinely be moved by his creatures, whether such responsiveness is compatible with his being without any deficiency, and what it means for Scripture to say that God does not change. It is not a complete confession of faith.
God is genuinely alive to his creatures and moved by what moves them, without thereby being any less perfect, powerful, or unshakeably good than he has eternally been.
1. God Genuinely Experiences Emotion
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I believe that God truly experiences emotion—including love, joy, and grief—in response to what happens among his creatures, and that this is not merely a figure of speech, an anthropomorphism, or an accommodation to human limitation, but a true report of God’s own inner life.
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I hold this because Scripture ascribes emotion to God pervasively and across a wide range of literary genres, including narrative (Genesis 6:6), prophecy, and epistle (Ephesians 4:30), a pattern too consistent and too varied to dismiss as merely figurative.
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I therefore reject the classical doctrine of divine impassibility in its strict form, which holds that God cannot be affected by his creatures in any respect.
2. This Emotion Involves No Deficiency
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I believe that God can be genuinely moved, and can genuinely grieve, while remaining entirely without deficiency—in knowledge, in power, in need, or in character.
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God’s emotion is never occasioned by ignorance; nothing takes God by surprise.
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God’s emotion is never occasioned by powerlessness; his grief over an evil he has permitted is not evidence that he lacked the power to prevent it.
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God’s love and desire for his creatures are not evidence of any lack or incompleteness in him. His valuing someone or something intensely is a measure of the strength of his love, not of an unmet need.
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God’s emotional responses are always rightly proportioned to their objects. They are never excessive, misdirected, or capable of overwhelming his judgement or purposes.
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God’s grief coexists with, and never diminishes, his own secure and fundamental blessedness, which rests in his eternal life and the certainty of his purposes.
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On this basis, the rejoicing described in Luke 15:7 over a repentant sinner is God’s own true joy, and not merely the joy of angels or of the redeemed observing from a distance.
3. God’s Unchangeableness Is the Unchangeableness of His Character
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I believe that when Scripture declares that God does not change (Malachi 3:6, James 1:17), it is speaking of the constancy of his character, his moral will, and his covenant faithfulness, not making an exhaustive claim that nothing about God ever changes in any respect.
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God’s goodness, justice, faithfulness, and love are, and will always remain, entirely without variation.
4. Real Change Is Compatible With This Unchangeableness
- I distinguish three kinds of change that might be spoken of in connection
with God:
- A change in a merely relational fact about God—for instance, that a repentant sinner now stands in a new relationship to him—which requires no alteration in God himself.
- A real, intrinsic change that is not a change in God’s nature or character—for instance, God’s own occurrent joy or grief at a particular event, or, most significantly, the incarnation.
- A change in God’s essential nature, character, or moral will, which never occurs and cannot occur.
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I believe the incarnation is a real change of the second kind. Before a particular point in time, the eternal Word did not subsist in a human nature; from that point onward, he did. Because time is genuinely tensed—because the past is truly past and the present truly present, rather than all moments being equally and timelessly real—this is an objective change in what is true of the Word, not merely a shift in perspective on an unchanging whole.
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This change, however momentous, does not touch God’s essential nature or character. What is new is the human nature assumed, and the union of that nature to the person of the Word; the divine nature itself is not thereby altered, diminished, or converted.
- Every change God undergoes—whether entering into time, assuming a human nature, or being moved to grief or joy—is freely undertaken by God himself, and never imposed upon him by anything outside himself. His capacity for such change is an expression of his freedom and love, not evidence of dependency or incompleteness.
5. This Position Is Consistent with the Chalcedonian Formula
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The Chalcedonian Definition (451) confesses Christ as one person in two natures, united “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation,” and insists that the property of each nature is preserved even as both are united in a single person.
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Of these four qualifications, only “without change” (Greek: atreptōs) bears directly on the claims made above. Read in its own context, this clause excludes the divine nature being converted into the human nature, or altered or diminished by taking humanity to itself; it equally excludes the human nature being absorbed into divinity. It is a claim about the integrity of each nature considered in itself, not a claim that the person of the Word gains no new true predicates through the union.
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My claim that the Word came to have a human nature he did not have before is a claim of precisely this second, permitted kind. Something new is truly said of the person—that he is now also human, born of Mary, growing in wisdom and stature, and in time crucified—while nothing is said to have changed in the divine nature itself, which remains, considered in itself, exactly what it eternally is.
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This is the same distinction the tradition already relies upon in the doctrine of the communication of attributes (communicatio idiomatum), and it echoes Cyril of Alexandria’s own formula that the Word “suffered impassibly”: truly suffering as the single subject of the incarnate life, while his divine nature remained, in itself, untouched by that suffering. My position stands in this same line. Real change may truly be said of God the Son as a person without the divine nature itself being said to change.
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Nothing in this statement implies any mixture of the two natures into a third kind of thing, nor any division of Christ into two persons, nor any separation of the human nature from the person of the Word once assumed. The remaining three qualifications of the Definition—without confusion, without division, without separation—are accordingly not in question here.
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I recognise one respect in which this statement goes beyond Chalcedon rather than merely restating it. I hold that God’s own nature, and not only the incarnate person’s human experience, is genuinely responsive to his creatures: that God grieved over human wickedness (Genesis 6:6) long before the incarnation, and not merely by way of the human nature the Word would one day assume. This claim falls outside the scope of the Chalcedonian Definition, which addresses the union of two natures in Christ rather than the general question of whether God as such can be moved by his creatures. It therefore does not contradict the text of Chalcedon, but it does go beyond the wider doctrine of divine apatheia that the bishops who wrote it, and Cyril himself, generally took for granted.