Divine Impassibility: Does God Experience Fleshly Passions?

Impassibility is one of the basic biblical teachings, and denying it implies that God is created flesh.

Divine impassibility is the answer to the question, "Does God have flesh like we do?" The Bible often locates passions in the flesh such as when Peter speaks of "the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul" (1 Pet 2:11) or when Paul speaks of “the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal 5:24).

Now, the answer is that God does not have nerves, lungs, hormones, etc. God is Spirit (John 4:24). And when Paul and Barnabas claim to be human and not divine they speak of themselves as having like passions (ὁμοιοπαθεῖς) as other humans (Acts 14:15).

From this point of view, God does not get hangry due to hunger; short of temper due to lack of sleep; or tired due to exhaustion. No flesh with its limits limit God.

But this does not mean that God lacks Love, Joy, and other attributes that the Bible affirms of him. It simply means that God loves without flesh; he loves as Spirit.

To be blunt, we might misuse love because of lust; God can’t. He is Impassible. So his Love for us remains sturdy—no tiredness, hungriness, or exhaustion will prevent his love from coming to us. He is fully Love.

Yet by claiming God is Spirit or lacks created flesh—as Jesus teaches and Genesis 1 tells us!—we also know that God is not a combination of flesh and Spirit, that is, he is simple—not a combination of being and created stuff (on this, see John 1, Gen 1, etc.).

All things that came into being, John tells us, did through the Word of the Father (John 1). So God is before all things, and so he is not a “created” thing.

Now, downstream of this basic biblical teaching are what we might call right and necessary consequences of divine impassibility. Sometimes this looks like the denial of any passion in God of all sorts.

When such arguments are made, most of us think: how can God have compassion then? How is he love?

But remember: what impassibility denies is that God is created flesh like the greek gods! The Bible still affirms he is Love, compassionate, etc. So we must affirm those truths according to the nature of God as expressed in Holy Scripture.

So we affirm compassion in God as Spirit, uncreated, fleshless. That does make “compassion” less—since our compassion is a created analogue of God’s. His is prior, more real than ours.

There is more to say, but this is a clarification of something I said yesterday. I’ll write on this in a fuller way at one point.

But all that to say, impassibility is one of the basic biblical teachings, and denying it implies that God is created flesh. Although, I completely grant that people who deny impassibility rarely mean that.

I am saying it “implies” such a conclusion, not that people make that conclusion.