This is interesting. Of course, I would need to read the actual article to have any real opinion on the argument for divine impassibility from the book of Hebrews. However, I will express a provisional reaction to Pastor Ryken’s summary:
First, the very nature of the incarnation entails a change for the Son of God. It is clear from Hebrews 2 and elsewhere in Scripture that he took on human flesh and blood in order to do what what he could not do as God, namely, suffer.
Second, according to the theological principle of the communication of idioms, the suffering that Jesus experienced cannot be predicated to his divine nature, but only to his human nature.
Third, the sufferings of Christ were not revelational but eschatological. That is to say, they were not intended to show us something about the divine nature that we could not otherwise see, but to accomplish the work of redemption unto eternal life. DeYoung writes: “His sufferings tell us nothing about the eternal suffering heart of God and everything about the completion of the plan of salvation.”
Finally, as someone acquainted with human suffering, Jesus Christ can sympathize with us in our own sufferings. This properly satisfies one impulse of those who deny impassibility, which is to find comfort in God. God offers us this comfort in Christ.
The first and second points, however, all depend on the credibility of the third. The “change for the Son of God” (I assume “for” instead of “in” is a needful protection of immutability) may well have been in order for God to be more clearly visible. If God became man in order to better reveal God then the change is accounted for without leaving any argument for divine impassibility but rather leaving clear evidence for theopaschites to point to.
And the third point needs to be argued. I hope that no one thinks that the great truth that the sufferings of Christ were eschatological counts as evidence that they were not revelational? The most that can be said is that, if his sufferings were eschatological (as they were), then denying that they were revelational does not leave us with purposeless suffering. But that’s not a positive argument that his suffering were not, in fact, both.
The second argument about the communication of idioms assumes what it is supposed to prove. Certainly Christ’s human sufferings were the sufferings of the human nature. That is not in question I don’t think. The question is: Did his human sufferings reveal anything about the divine nature? Does God suffer with those who suffer? Was this some new thing with the incarnation or has it always been true? Did God assume a human nature to gain new abilities to have solidarity with his creation, or did he assume a human nature (in part!) to reveal what sort of God he is and how he has always been in solidarity with his creatures?
In other words, if the second argument is supposed to be a positive case of divine impassibility, then it fails. It can be used as a defeater argument for passibility at most. But the persuasive case needs to be made in some other way.
Finally, I agree that God offers us comfort in Christ, but is this only the comfort of Arianism? Didn’t Athanasius argue that, if Arianism was true, that we are left without any real knowledge of God? [edit: In case anyone wants to impute things that I did not say here, the only point in this paragraph is that we orthodox Christians (everyone involved in the discussion) should be able to offer more comfort than Arians and offer a firmer basis for the knowledge of God.]
I don’t have any off the cuff thoughts tied particularly to Hebrews, but I don’t understand how Jesus could so insist that he did all that he saw the Father doing, and yet be innovating at the essential point of his vocation. Was God on the cross imitating God or not? His onlookers thought not. They thought God’s king, the son of God, could only be revealed in his descending from the cross. But the real God stayed there.
And what does Paul say? To take one representative example: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” Imitating Christ in his humiliation and sacrifice (from which I find it hard to conceive of removing his suffering) is identical to imitating God himself.
Oddly, I’ve been planning to blog about this for awhile, not with any Christian in mind, but with the new TV show Heroes. Naturally, I find the X-men lite device quite intriging and entertaining (though the material with the cheerleader needs to stop being so darkly comedic and voyeuristically gruesome). But the monologues are pure torture. If I wasn’t intent on being entertained, however, and wanted to engage in pretentious world view analysis, I think I would find them interesting. In the first episode we find a young professor blathering on how the cockroach is made in the image of God, but not people. Why. Because the cockroach is a great survivor. 
But there is hope for the human race. Maybe we’ll acquire the divine image after all. How? By growing the ability to fly or time travel or regenerate or do some other superhuman miracle. Then, when we’re more than merely human, then we will deserve to be considered to bear the image of God.
There is no doubt in my mind that the divine image does entail a future of glory much like “superman.” But when that gift is given, it will be a verdict on our humanity now, as we see it in the life of Jesus and even his death on the cross. That was truly Jesus’ baptism and on the cross God was saying “This is my beloved son.” The resurrection was not a denial of the cross, but a proof of what God thought of it and how he saw himself reflected in it, properly for once. The ones claiming the son of God would only leave the cross, were thinking of a fake god.
In my opinion, the cruciform revelation of God is a really important and essential feature of Christianity. With miltant Islam and in many other religions, we see what happens when it is not affirmed.
When Jesus was sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsamane, was it only Jesus’ human nature that was troubled and crying out to God, or was the divine person of the Son of God speaking to the divine person of the Father?
I would have said the divine person of the son was crying out to God, but apparently, the affirmation that Jesus had a human will, as well as a divine will comes from this text, and that’s not a nestorian calvinistic innovation, but something from deep in Church history.
His human will asks the father for a way out, and says not my will but thine be done. The will of the son would always be so united to the father that there would never even be a question, hence this shows the dual will of teh Christ.
I’d have moved in some direction of seeing this as the son’s divine will expresed in time, just as the father’s divine will is expressed in time with the appearance of contingency.
I’d still like to know what Lutherans would say about this connundrum.
What do anti-theopaschites do with ‘grieving the Holy Spirit’. Is the grief seperate from the idea of suffering?
Hmm. I’ll have to look up that DeYoung article in WTJ. From the summary, if it is a fair one, I’d have to say that DeYoung’s really botched his task. And I say that as someone in the peculiar position of agreeing with a strong notion of divine impassibility, but disagreeing almost entirely with the arguments summarized here in defense of it.
First, I’m not sure what it means to say “the incarnation entails a change for the Son of God.” I don’t think the incarnation entails any essential change for God the Son, though it involves a true change of relation. Of course, such a change can be predicated of the Logos as if it were an essential change, just as my “becoming thinner than Bill” can be predicated of me when Bill gains enough weight to become heavier than I am, even if my own weight remains the constant and unchanged.
Moreover, is the question in Hebrews one of incarnation for the sake of God undergoing suffering, which he could not do as God, or for the sake of God undergoing the suffering as human, which he could not do as God? These are distinct propositions. If the latter, then the argument proves nothing either way about whether or not God somehow suffers as God.
Second, the point about the communicatio idiomatum needs to account for the dogma that there is a single divine Person who is the subject of both the divine nature and the human nature of Jesus Christ. Even if one didn’t wish to say “God suffered on the cross” one cannot deny that “God the Son, the Logos, suffered on the cross” without denying orthodox christology. Of course, Reformed theology seems to continually slip towards Nestorian errors, so I’m not surprised. But if it is the Logos who suffers, the very Word of the Father, then there’s much more theological reflection required before one can dismiss theopaschism.
Third, as you say, “revelational” and “eschatological” are not mutually exclusive, which is the specific premise required for the argument. Indeed, I would think that the “eschatological” is inherently “revelational.” The point of eschatology, after all, is that the cosmos, in and through humanity, might more fully participate in and disclose the life of God. Jesus’ sufferings not only reveal God, but they reveal the true fulfillment and manifestation of humanity and thereby reveal the God that humanity was always already intended to reveal. A fissure between the revelational and the eschatological threatens not only to deform our doctrine of God, but also our theological anthropology.
Such a fissure also seems to make a hash of a lot of biblical texts that indicate that Jesus Christ is the revelation of God in all that he said and did – “anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” Indeed, the centurion’s confession at the foot of the cross would seem to make the cross supremely revelational of who God is. After all, in the synoptic traditions (especially Mark) the “way of Yahweh” that Jesus comes to follow is precisely the way of the cross. If the cross is not revelational of who God is in himself, then nothing is.
Of course, all such revelation is analogical in nature and therefore, must be interpreted in a way that accounts for the absolute distinction between Creator as Creator and creature as creature. Thus, even if we wanted to say that, in some qualified sense, “God suffers” (and I’m not sure we do, at least so straightforwardly) we couldn’t say that in a sense univocal with suffering as it experienced within the created order (just as God doesn’t know just as we know or love just as we love or will just as we will, univocally speaking).
In that respect, then, open theism and process theology are excluded. But it is an exceedingly infertile theological imagination that can only conceive of open theist or process versions of theopaschism, especially given a theological tradition that embraces eternal processions (e.g., begetting, spiration) within the impassible and immutable life of the Trinity. If God is the eternal event of the Trinitarian processions, then can one exclude a priori any notion of this sort of divine life necessarily excludes suffering in every sense? Is an impassible sort of suffering any more nonsensical than an eternal sort of begetting?
Finally, I’m not sure that the notion that Jesus can sympathize with us really does much to touch the impulse of those who deny impassibility.
What if that impulse is to confess a God whose power is so great that he can even enter truly and fully into the depths of our sufferings, without himself being changed by them, in order to redeem those very sufferings through his divine power and presence?
What if that impulse is, first and foremost, to think through theologically the implications of what it means for the Son to be the express image of God and to remain faithful to the whole counsel of God, even where it doesn’t fit our preconceived notions of what a being must be to be “divine”? Are the only options available those of a crass notion of divine passibility?
At any rate, the summary provided of DeYoung’s article gives no hint of anything like a persuasive argument or even a true engagement with the kinds of issues at play in the discussion. I’ll have to go look it up. It’s difficult to believe that WTJ would publish an article as defective as this one sounds.
Regarding pduggie’s first comment, historically “will” pertains to nature, not to Person. Thus, there is a single (though perhaps three-fold) will in essence of God, the divine nature, despite the three Persons. So it’s also proper to say that the divine Person of the Son cried out to God in his humanity, in keeping with his human will, but not in a manner univocally identical with his divinity or divine will.
The very same church Fathers (such as Maximus) who distinguished between two wills in the Person of the Son, nonetheless, saw the humanity of the Son as an enhypostatized humanity and so, while there was a distinction of wills, the divine and human wills of Christ were never at variance with one another. Rather, the human will of Christ was caught up (without confusion, change, division, or separation) into the divine life of the Person. Thus the humanity of Jesus (analogically) reveals God in himself.
What that means for how we interpret Gethsemane, I’m not entirely sure. But it seems to me that the cry of Christ in the garden manifests how perfect Love must regard the effects of his creation’s rebellion and what it must cost for that creation to be rescued. Moroever, it points to the mutually self-giving love of a Father who must give his only Son over to death — a Son upon whom the worst of humanity’s rebellion and the power of sin will fall — and of a Son who gives himself up to this.
I don’t know if he is Arian, but he does not seem to be Calcedonian either. He seems to be asserting that we have not actually touched the Word of Life. But this is arch-heretical. He must be both man and God, not man here and God there.
Who is he? He is man. Who is he? He is God. Who suffered? The man Jesus Christ. Who suffered? Jesus Christ, the Divine Word.
When he was in the garden, who was crying out to the Father? The man Jesus Christ. Who was crying out to the Father? Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
But Ryken seems to severly misunderstand the doctrine of the impassibility of God. Theologians like Aquinas stoutly defend the impassibility of God, yet the passion of Christ is a Catholic term. The doctrine states that God is acting according the the maximum of His potential always. (Or is fully act and no potential.) Thus we cannot cause something to happen to Him because this would cause Him to pass into some state He was only potentially before. But it does not mean that God is not love. And if love implies (on some conditions) pain, God is in pain (at least in some sense). (This may seem to be a contradiction because certianly inter-Trinitarian there is no pain. But it is no more a contradiction that creation itself.) To speak pretend we know who God is aside from Christ is idolatry. We only know the beginning because we know He who is the alpha. Love is always perfected in Him. God is love, not God loves. I love, not I am love.
Anyway, that’s how I see it.
1. No one is an arian. I was making a point to appeal to non-arians: that we all want to be able to offer more comfort than they can afford.
2. Ryken is relaying an article, not necessarily his own views. I’m sure he would agree with Packer’s view which Derek Thomas quoted. And I thought Packer’s statement was quite good.
This is an interesting discussion. I saw a critique by F. Nigel Lee that argued that it was heretical to say that “God died on the cross.” I asked a few people about this, because I think Jesus was God and thus have no problem calling him God, and was surprised to find that most people agreed that you shouldn’t say that God died on the cross.
I didn’t know the tech. term though.
God suffered death on the cross. How could it be otherwise? God the Son experienced life and death as a man. Our hymns are often better than our quasi-Nestorian theology. “And can it be?”
Amazing love! How can it be
That thou, my God, shouldst die for me?
‘Tis mystery all! th’ imortal dies!
Who can explore his strange design?
Although no one need be labeled an Arian, RPC Hanson and Roland Williams have made it pretty clear that Arius and his followers denied the deity of Christ in order to shield God from any form of suffering. It is a testimony to the church that she resisted the universal cultural (Greek) tendency to guard the deity from contact with the physical world and embraced the full divinity of Jesus.
It is precisely the fact that Jesus did not “come down” from the cross that establishes his claim to be the true and living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Jews taunted him to come down and prove his claims. But only God, the true and living God of love, would have remained on the cross and died. Only God himself is capable of such a sacrifice, such self-giving love. Aristotle’s God would not have even known that he was hanging on cross since he is an ontological principle, an “unmoved mover” or “Self-thinking thought.” Plato’s god would not have felt the nails and the cross since he cannot be affected by suffering. He is above all of that. But the true God, God the Son, not only knew he was about to die on the cross, he willfully and courageously embraced his death on the cross as a voluntary offering of himself for humanity. What is this but to die a divine death, to reveal a divine way of dying?
I am a theopaschite to the death!
[1] Well, God bled on the cross (Acts 20.28). I take that to mean that God died on the cross.
[2] As for Gethsemane, see http://lutheranguest.blogspot.com/2006_06_01_lutheranguest_archive.html.
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I agree with your take on Acts 20:28, but some interpret the text as saying “care for the church of God, which he obtained with the blood of his Own” where “his Own” is a reference to Jesus.
But if the blood of bulls and goats does not free us from sin, than neither does the blood of a man, no matter how good he is. Only God’s blood could possibly save. Therefore the man Jesus Christ is God. Not Jesus is a man, and Jesus is God; not God was transformed and man was transformed so that Jesus is an amalgamation of God and man; the man Jesus Christ is God. The logos became flesh and dwelt among us. The logos did not associate itself with a human body, the logos itself became flesh. Of course “One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of that manhood into God.” Yes “For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ” but if you have touched my hand, you have touched me, so likewise if you have tasted Christ’s flesh, you have tasted God. “Of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood” not a person with God here and man here, but a man who is God.
But I am not saying you are anathama. I am merely saying your doctrines are silly. And I am not sure what quote by Packer you are refering to.
This post quoting von Balthasar from Al sums things up, I think, very nicely.