[RANT ON]

OK, last post today; I promise.

Remember when you first met your wife, and fell in love with her? Remember your heartrate? Remember the difficulty breathing? Remember the shakes?

Do you dare presume to think you’ve had a richer emotional experience than God? Do you think God doesn’t know what it’s like to fall in love? You think the crazy sick feeling is original with you?

And something else.

Ever been a day when you feel on top of the world and the weather is gorgeous and traffic is easy and you come home whistling (I can’t whistle, but you probably can) and you walk into the kitchen (or whatever room you walk into) and your wife is sitting slumped crying her eyes out because of something you don’t know about? Do you stay happy? Does your emotional state not change?

And is not God rejoicing when you rejoice and then, when you encounter something new and sad, weeping when you weep? Is the way you react to your wife’s emotional state with your own corresponding emotions something unique to you and alien to God?

If Christians think only creatures can emphatize with them no wonder so many pray to the saints.

Jesus is not an exception to God but a revelation of him. God is emotional. God loves and hates and does it in response to events and the plights of his people. He gets provoked to anger though he is long-suffering. I’ve heard more than one good explanation as to what it means to say God is without passions. If it means he lacks emotions then it is just wrong.

If you associate emotions in God with free will theism, you will only drive many into free will theism. People who read their Bibles know that God is passionate about them is fully engaged in their circumstances. God isn’t Deism + divine concurrence. He’s more like Dionysus.

The fact that God is transcendant over all is an odd excuse for disbelieving what he tells you about his feelings.

[RANT OFF]