Rob Lister, 'God is Impassible and Impassioned: Toward a Theology of Divine Emotion' (Crossway/Apollos)
Can God be both outside
time and in time? This question arises from the reading of a new book by Rob
Lister, God is Impassible and
Impassioned: Towards a Theology of Divine Emotion (Crossway/Apollos). The
book is well-informed regarding the historical positions on God’s
possibility and impassibility, and is well written. Anyone interested in systematic theology should read it. In it Dr Lister argues, as a preface to his account of 'divine emotion', that
with the coming of creation, and the passing of time that the creation entails,
God is immanent within what he has created, upholding it and interacting within
it. He holds that the best way to understand this is to think of God as not only timelessly eternal
‘before’ the creation, but also coming to be in time at the creation.
That is, he is both eternal apart from and transcendent of the creation, and temporal within the creation immanent within it. Lister then applies this ‘model’ to
God’s impassibility and passionedness, though considering this application falls
outside the scope of the present post.
Lister’s position
The heart of Lister’s view can be found in these words
-
Thus I believe that atemporality is
one way in which God is ontologically other than us. And yet, I also maintain
that God’s temporal participation with us, following creation, is reflective of his voluntary and gracious
immanence. This finding, in turn, portrays an instructive symmetrical duality
between God’s in se atemporality and
his in re omnitemporality, and what
we might call his in se impassibility
and his in re impassionedness, on the
other. (229) (see also 226-7)
Lister concurs with such a duality as he finds in theologians
such as Bruce Ware (his doctoral supervisor), Millard Erickson (226-7, 229,
231), and John Frame (227 fn) As I
understand this appeal to theistic ‘duality’ as the author calls it, he is
proposing that we understand God as existing in two modes, in order to do
justice to a central aspect of Christian theism, that God both transcends the
creation and is immanent within it. There is a timelessly eternal mode, according
to which God exists prior to the creation, and an immanent mode, according to
which God is in time and so is temporally present in it. As far as God’s
‘emotional life’ is concerned, in
eternity (in se as Lister puts it) God
is impassible, while in time (in re) God is impassioned.
However, sometimes in reading the book it is not clear
whether Lister claims that in creating the universe God ceases to be eternal,
becoming temporal, (in the manner of William Lane Craig), or whether God
remains eternal and upon creation takes on temporal relations which he does not
possess when considered in himself. Maybe the second view is the view that he should take, given the emphasis on
‘duality’ in God. The difference is
between a 'sequential' duality, God ceasing to be eternal upon creating a
universe, and a ‘simultaneous’ duality, God remaining eternal when he creates, and the second mode of the duality comes about. I think that the quotation above, and the
emphasis on God’s remaining eternal upon his creating a universe, most
accurately represents Lister’s overall position.
Classical Christian theism
To understand this view of God on time, it is
worthwhile comparing it with the classical position, the one that dominated the
church before the Reformation, was taken up by the Reformers, elaborated by the
Reformed Orthodox such as Francis Turretin and the Puritans such as Stephen
Charnock, and which was adopted by the Westminster divines, and by the Savoy
Confession and the Baptist Confession of 1689. This cuts this particular cake rather
differently from Lister and the others. The Westminster Confession reads:
God hath all life, glory, goodness,
blessedness, in and of himself…..He [God] is the alone fountain of all being,
of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things; and hath most sovereign
dominion over them, to do by them, for them and upon them, whatsoever himself
pleaseth. (II.II)
Here, unmistakably, it is to the one eternal God that
the creation and ordering of the creation, in all its aspects, is ascribed. No suggestion of a 'duality'.
Lister again: some
difficulties
So - it appears - Lister holds that God is atemporal, and at the creation
is able to be in time., or is inevitably in time. As we can see, the classical position cuts the cake
differently. The eternal God is able to create, sustain and govern, all
creatures and their actions. He does so by his will, and communicates grace and
glory through his activities as a communicative agent, through his
communicable character or attributes. (Which attributes count as communicable
and which not partly depends on what stage in the history of creation and
redemption one is referring to). In carrying out his external actions God
remains as he is eternally, distinct from the creation which depends upon him.
If we should argue (as William Craig) that God is
eternal ‘before’ the creation, and temporal afterwards, then he ceases to
be eternal upon creation and becomes temporal, ihis carries its own
difficulties. For it then turns out that the eternal God is not infinite,
eternal and unchangeable, but, finite, capable of ceasing to be eternal, and so
changeable.
The difficulties for Lister’s position as a 'modified
classical theist' are serious. For
example, if God is eternal then he has no memory; everything that exists in
time is eternally before his mind. But God-in-time has a memory, for being
in time he must have a past and thus his access to the past must be memorial.
So God, the one God, both does not have
a memory and has a memory. depending on which mode of the duality one is referring to. Is that not serious? It might be replied that it is
God-in-eternity that has no memory, God-in-time has a memory. The eternal God
does not change, but God-in-time changes, as time passes. He now establishes a
covenant, now leads Israel out of Egypt, now punishes them for the idolatrous
worship of the Golden Calf, now delivers them from their enemies, and so on.
But God-in-time and the eternal God and not two Gods, but the one God, who, it
is proposed by this modification io the classical position, has two ‘faces’,
one eternal and the other temporal. But possessing these two faces makes God
incoherent; it imperils the integrity of the divine unity.
These difficulties attend the doctrine of God that is
characteristic of the theology of Bruce Ware and others. It is, as they put it, a modified classical theism.
Why does the author (and those who think like him) go to these lengths? The nub
of the matter for him and for many another contemporary theologian lies in
trying to provide a satisfactory account of divine-human dialogue such as we
find in Scripture. To be satisfactory, such dialogue must in their eyes be
genuinely ‘open’. (See bottom 224)
The way back?
I believe that the way back out of this tangle lies in
recognizing two facts: the first is (as Augustine put it many years ago, ‘God
can will a change without changing a will’), and the second is the
reaffirmation that God and human persons, his creatures, are not and cannot be not
equal dialogue partners. A word about each.
The point, made in a characteristically Augustinian
manner, is fundamental to classical
Christian theism. God is able from his eternal vantage point to bring about
changes without himself changing.The changes are in the created cosmos, not in God
One of the reasons Lister has for going down the
duality route is that he believes that the classical doctrine’s view of divine
accommodation commits God to make-believe, to representing himself as if he changes while being eternally
changeless. (230) But this objection
rests on a misunderstanding.
We need to bear in mind that his conversations
recorded for us in Scripture are invariably pedagogic. God is not like a modern counsellor or therapist, non-judgmental. Nor does he chat with his people
to pass the time of day. He communicates with them in order to bring about changes in them;
for example to increase their faith, he now tests them, now reaffirms his
promises to them. To test them it is necessary sometimes that God threatens by making a certain prediction, as
he does with Moses in the wilderness, and with Hezekiah, for example. In
order that his words to them are indeed threats, he proposes to them that he will, for
example, disinherit his people, and then, Moses having responded to such a
threat to him in faith, pleading God's promises on behalf of his people, God
relents. But there is no need in order to understand the sequence of threatening
and then relenting, to propose that such changes not amount to a change in God. Rather it is his eternal will to
test the faith of Moses by eternally willing this temporal sequence. Knowing the end from the beginning, God does not
change, though Moses does. He grows in faith. The dialogue is for a purpose,
and the dialogue partners are not equals, (as Lister recognizes; he is good on
the Creator-creature distinction), as two people chatting together
may be thought of as equals.
In such ways as this God accommodates himself to his
creation. That is, he comes down in grace and judgment, according to his
purpose. This ‘coming down’ is not a case of God re-locating (downsizing!), nor
is it a case of acting as-if. It is not make-believe. God really talks to his people; he
acts as their gracious friend and disciplinarian. It is simply that God does
not change in doing so. But in order for God to achieve his goals he has typically
to communicate with his people bit-by-bit.
In a system of testing by examination, the learning takes place, then the taking of
the examination, and then the result of the examination. It could not be any other
way. The process is spaced out in time, first one stage and then the other
stage. If the eternal God is the one setting the test, the spacings-out have
still to be observed. The creature changes, but not the Creator.
Moral
The moral of this interesting proposal of Lister’s is
that he has not sufficiently attended to some of the aspects (or resources) of classical
theism, notably that God’s attributes are possessed by him eternally and essentially, and so
are not capable of being modified as part of the proposed ‘duality’. And that
the classical way is to relate God’s sovereign and eternal relation to what is distinct from him, in time that is, by distinguishing (as Calvin did, along with many others) between God in se and God quoad nos. Such an understanding of God’s one eternal
will provides the resources for some understanding of the relation between the eternal
God and the changes that occur in his creation, though much remains mysterious, of course.
Next time I hope to say more about Dr Lister's contribution, focussing particularly on 'divine emotion'.
