« Previous Post | Next Post »
« Previous post in category | Next post in category »

Theology - Trinity: Passibility and Providence

[Print] | [PDF] | [Email]

A proposal, not a settled conclusion. The problem is passibility. For most Christian theologians, God is by definition impassible, not subject to passions nor passive in relation to His creation. Recently, of course, many theologians have challenged this, sometimes at the expense of God’s Godness and Lordship. But you’ve got to admit they have a point. Yahweh is a fairly passionate God, and Jesus the God-man expresses emotion and suffers. The tradition has ways of dealing with these things – anthropomorphism, distinguishing the impassible divinity from the passible flesh, and so on. To many recent theologians, though, this seems like special pleading.

Here’s my (counterintuitive) proposal: A theology that is both Trinitarian and Reformed provides a way of resolution. The “Reformed” part of that thesis is the counterintuitive part: No theology seems less likely to endorse divine passibility than Reformed theology. Maybe we could soften the oddity of the thesis by substituting “Augustinian.”

In any case, here’s the argument:

1) God is “pure act,” never unrealized, never anything less than wholly Himself. Yet, within the Triune life, God acts on God. The Father begets the Son, and in relation to the Father’s begetting, the Son is “passive.” The Spirit is breathed out by the Father and Son, and in that breathing-out the Spirit is “passive.” The Father eternally glorifies the Son in the Spirit, and the Son receives that glory, but the Son eternally responds by glorifying the Father through the Spirit, a glory that the Father receives “passively.” Passibility in the sense of passivity is a dimension of the Triune life.

2) God acts on God in history. The Father sends the Son, and having received the Spirit from the Father at His ascension, the Son sends the Spirit to us. As incarnate, the Son does all that He does to glorify the Father, even as the Father glorifies Him. The Triune life of gift, reception, and response is worked out in God’s work in history.

3) Here’s key point #1: God acts on God in history, using the world to act on God. The Father sends the Son, who is incarnate by the Spirit; that’s an act of the Father in regard to the Son, but the Father employs the womb of Mary to send the Son in flesh. The Father glorifies the Son, and part of that glory comes through the work of the Spirit who turns men to praise. The Father glorifies the Son through creatures; human praise is a means by which the Father glorifies the Son. Too, the Father offers the Son as a sin offering, but He does that through the mechanism of sinful man who raise wicked hands against the Son. In all this, the Son is “passible” in both senses of the word: He is passive in relation to creation (the praise and hatred of men) and He suffers. But this is not ultimately a matter of the Son becoming subject to the creation, or becoming any whit the less Lord in His passibility. Rather, because the Father is acting on the Son through the creation, the Son’s “passibility” is the same passibility as His eternal passibility before the Father, though that is worked out in the incarnation in the context of a sinful world.

4) Here’s key part #2, the Reformed/Augustinian part: This construction seems to depend on a strong doctrine of divine providence, which includes a strong doctrine of concursus. All actions of creation are predestined by God, and carried out by God. The actions of the creatures are most deeply actions of God in creatures. Thus, again, all of the suffering and passivity of the Persons in history is ultimately God acting on God. God remains utterly Lord; God is at the same time vulnerable within his creation precisely because He is Lord, because the creation has no independent power of operation but only operates because it is operated upon.

5) This doesn’t remove all the difficulties, of course. What is going on when Jesus gets hungry? We can say that this is the Father using the creation to act through His Spirit on the Son, but what kind of action of the Father through the Spirit creates hunger? Perhaps we could work this out by positing inter-Trinitarian eros, so that the Son’s hunger is the incarnate form of His eternal desire for the life of the Father in the Spirit.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, December 15, 2009 at 9:25 am

Permission is given to use material on this site, provided the source is cited, blog entries are republished in full, and the author is notified in advance.

« Previous Post | Next Post » « Previous post in category | Next post in category »

Theology - Trinity: Passibility and Providence

« Previous Post | Next Post »
« Previous post in category | Next post in category »