Confessing the Impassible God (RBAP, Palmdale, California)
edited by
Ronald S. Baines
Richard C. Barcellos
James P. Butler
Stefan T. Lindblad
James M. Renihan
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What follows is the Preface to the book which I was delighted to be asked to write.
Half here, and half next month.
To many readers, Confessing the Impassible God will be a
surprising book. It articulates and defends the impassibility of God by Baptists, taking seriously the
statements of Baptist confessions of faith of the seventeenth century! Such
surprise is due largely to the custom of identifying Baptists exclusively with
the culture and theology of modern evangelicalism, the temper of mind of which
is concerned with modifying and supplanting the theological heritage of
Protestantism with innovations of various kinds. The contributors to this book
are well aware of such deviations. Furthermore, many Baptists have been taught
to believe that it is altogether alien to the Baptist outlook to formulate and
adhere to confessions of faith. Confessions of faith, it is customarily
believed, are uncharacteristic of the Baptist mentality, which is strongly
inclined to think that adherence to confessions cramps the mind and spirit of
the Christian church. The idea is that Baptists, being independents or
congregationalists in their polity, are marked by an individualism which
fosters in each congregation and each minister their own ways of expressing
their faith. But history is not on their side at this point. The authors of
this book take a different view.
I
So the first thing
to be said is that Confessing the
Impassible God is not an exercise in antiquarianism. All the essays which
form it have a positive theological stance, and one with distinctive practical
and pastoral consequences. The writing is at one and the same time impassioned
about classical Christian theism, and careful and serious
about the application of this confessional position to the contemporary church.
For a modern evangelical Baptist to adopt these recommendations will require
fresh thinking.
Before
we consider the book’s approach to God and his impassibility, let us reflect a
moment on the meaning of ‘impassible’ as applied to
God. The word is often mistaken for others, and given a meaning that
it does not have. For example,
it is often confused with impassable.
If the road is blocked by an avalanche we may say that as a consequence it is
‘impassable’; no one can get through. But divine impassibility has nothing that gets in the way of God being
accessible or available. Impassibility sets up no barriers. The authors
fervently believe that God has revealed himself in Scripture, and that the
disclosure of his own impassibility is a fundamental feature of this
revelation. But the impassible God may meet us in our need, deliver us from
our sin, and bring us unfailingly to glory. He is the very reverse of the
impassable road, blocked up after a rockslide.
Another
misconception is that an impassible God is impassive,
unfeeling and uncaring in the face of suffering and need. This suggestion has
links with the caricature of the impassible God as psychotically withdrawn,
indifferent to the needs of his creation. But no one in
orthodox Christianity has ever said such a thing, that God is blocked off
either psychologically or in other ways from his creation or from his people.
‘Impassible’
is a negative term. As ‘impossible’ means ‘not possible,’ so ‘impassible’ means ‘not
passible.’ So if God is
impassible, then he is not passible, not subject to the onset of passions or moods, and of changes of mind. It is not
simply that he is not in fact subject to the onset of passions, like a Stoic,
but he is not able to be made to have
a passion. Paradoxically,
being impassible does not denote a deficiency or lack in God, but it testifies
to God’s fullness, to his undiminishable goodness, to his eternal will. The goodness of God is such that while
the creation of the universe and the redemption of his people is a consequence of his
goodness, God cannot be affected by or molded by his creation, and especially
not by his human creation. It is as we, creatures in time and space, change or
are changed that this fullness of God comes to us in one form or another,
according to our different circumstances, and God’s unchanging purposes operate
upon us, as we exercise faith, or are disobedient, or careless, or defiant, or
forgetful. So God may be understood as a savior, a guide, or a judge, as he is
understood as the eternal upholder and governor of his creation.
Impassibility
is closely connected with God’s immutability. When in Hebrews
6 the author states that it is impossible for God to lie, he grounds this
statement in God’s own being. This immutability is
not something that
God has decided
to be—unchangeable—but it
is rooted in his nature, as the writer of the letter goes on to explain. “For
when God made a promise to Abraham, since he had no
one greater by whom to swear he swore by himself, saying, ‘Surely I will bless
you and multiply you.’” Impassibility is an aspect of such immutability. So God
does not simply decide to be constant in his character; it is his being (or essence) to be such, an
aspect of his greatness, his perfection. He cannot waver.
And so he cannot change his care, his love, his justice and so on, nor can he be changed, for he
expresses his character in accordance with his eternal purposes. The connectedness of impassibility with other aspects of God’s being or essence
is therefore important, and we shall return to it.
II
When the Second
London Confession of Faith asserts, as an aspect of
the God it confesses, that he is “without body, parts, or passions,” the Baptist
authors unashamedly copy the wording of earlier confessions of the English
Reformation. That language, in turn, borrows from the thought of the medieval
church and of patristic theology, going back to Augustine and beyond. In
working in this way those confessional Particular Baptists avowed that
their congregations are in direct line with the theology of the Christian
church from her inception.
Note
the rather brave and gracious way that these men worked. During the times when
Baptists were persecuted and discriminated against in England (John Bunyan put
in Bedford jail for preaching Christ, and so forth), they nonetheless
appropriated for their own confessions the language of the XXXIX Articles of
Religion of the persecuting Church of England. (And the same would have been
true, I reckon, had the English Parliament of the 1640’s had its way, and its
anti-blasphemy legislation had been implemented. Baptists would then have been
on the receiving end of Westminster Confession-style discrimination and
persecution. But Cromwell intervened.)
They deliberately followed
this wording both of the
Articles, and of the
Westminster Confession of
Faith, and of the Savoy Declaration (so long as conscience permitted
them to do so) because they wanted it to be known that they had the same
doctrinal pedigree.
The
Reformation was not a revolution, the discovering or inventing of a new kind of
Christianity, but a re-formation, a protest against a corrupt church. This
meant that wherever there were grounds for agreement and continuity, the
Reformers upheld the ancient faith. Thus in asserting God’s transcendence, the trinitarian character of the Godhead, the incarnation in which the Logos took on human nature, the
creation of the universe out of nothing, the ancient
theological landmarks were left undisturbed. But where there was corruption—over the denial of justification by faith alone, by the promotion of human
merit, the invention of acts of supererogation, and so on—the Reformers vigorously opposed
the Roman Church.
The
English Particular Baptists adopted this
same stance; opposing paedobaptism, episcopacy, certain liturgical practices,
and the intolerance of the Church under the Stuarts, and later on that of the
Presbyterians of the Long Parliament. As is shown in this book, they were
resolute in upholding the theology and the doctrines of grace of Augustine and
the Reformers, and of their Anglican and Puritan successors. To underline the
point, they steadfastly confessed this theology in very similar and often
identical words. Unfortunately, later Baptists who have acknowledged their
confessions have often done so without a great deal of enthusiasm or conviction
regarding this abiding theology. This book is an expression of a renewed
enthusiasm and commitment for this confessional position.
